David Dubrow's Blog, page 38

Friday Links: Cellar Dwellers, Nasty, and Saints Who Battled Satan

We could go on and on about election returns in New Hampshire, but we won’t. Instead let’s look back at what happened in the world of horror, of the bizarre and unusual:

Monster Brains brought us The Torments of Hell with an image that demands your attention. SFW, probably.
This week it’s been all David Dubrow all the time at Nev Murray’s Confessions of a Reviewer!! . In Part One of the interview, we talked a bit about me in general, and in Part Two we discussed my writing and I underwent the dreaded Ten Confessions. The feature ended with his review of my newest novel, The Nephilim and the False Prophet. I can’t begin to thank Mr. Murray enough for his kind words, his encouragement, and his allowing me to take up so much space on his site, where far more successful and skilled writers have been featured. I’m both honored and humbled.
Fans of 1980’s sitcoms will get a kick out of House of Self-Indulgence ‘s analysis of the 1989 movie Hellgate: “I didn’t have my stopwatch handy, but I’d say Ron Palillo, Arnold Horshack from TV’s Welcome Back Kotter, is naked for at least three minutes. And get this, he’s naked in a manner I’ve never seen anyone naked before.”
Have you ever heard of the 1939 Bela Lugosi film The Gorilla? Even if you have, you must click over to Zombos’ Closet to see some very lively print material from it.
Aleteia interviewed Dr. Paul Thigpen, author of Saints Who Battled Satan: “What do you think is the best way to convince someone that Satan exists and is operative? When speaking with secular people, I would have them consider first the accumulated evidence of confirming testimony. Throughout history, people of vastly different cultures around the globe have affirmed the reality of evil spirits — even when they have disagreed about most other spiritual realities.”
At his always-incisive R’lyeh Tribune , Sean Eaton began a series on cellar dwellers: “A basement, or cellar for some of you easterners, figures in David H. Keller’s helpfully titled The Thing in the Cellar (1932).  The story first appeared in Weird Tales alongside Clark Ashton Smith’s The Planet of the Dead and The Last Day, a poem by Robert E. Howard, among other offerings.  Keller was a psychiatrist who later turned to writing horror fiction, for which the earlier occupation provided excellent training.  The Thing in the Cellar is essentially a clinical case study in how not to manage childhood fears of the darkness beneath the stairs.  One wonders whether he drew inspiration from one of the files in his office.”
The Blue Took reviewed the short film Nasty at The Slaughtered Bird : “It’s 1982 and 12-year old Doug’s father has mysteriously disappeared. Searching for clues to his whereabouts, our young protagonist is drawn into the grainy, vivid world of VHS horror. The lucky little devil. Not only because I can put myself firmly into his shite 80’s shoes and know frame for frame what pre-digital delights await him, but also because the gritty, pounding realm director Prano Bailey-Bond recreates may be more incredible than the real thing.”
Gearing up for the 2016 season of Twin Peaks, Breakfast in the Ruins looked back at the first two seasons: “If we examine the series in terms of its most basic conflicts in fact, we find a universe that is closer in essence to the romantic fantasy of something like ‘Star Wars’ or ‘Lord of the Rings’ that it is to the morally ambiguous, reality-based fiction that it at first appears to be, in spite of the myriad complications that are thrown in to put us off the scent.”
Random Reviews  randomly reviewed the 1972 giallo movie The Red Queen Kills Seven Times: “It seems like centuries ago, but when I first caught wind of 1972’s The Red Queen Kills Seven Times, I wanted to watch and review it immediately.  It looked too rad to be real.  Clearly, I wasn’t able to see it that very second.  There were false starts in profusion.  Everything from disappearing auctions (yes, I tried to watch it the legit way, and it would have cost me a pretty penny) to torrents that contained corrupted files.  I even had the 35mm reels in my possession, but my dog ate them!”
Ghost Hunting Theories turned its theoretical, ghost-hunting eye on Nikola Tesla: “Tesla’s new way of looking at the world is reminiscent of theories espoused by Voltaire, Twain and Mach. Mach is perhaps the most directly relevant of these three – his theories that atoms did not exist were actually a large part of Einstein’s relativity theory. Like Tesla, however, Mach did not receive a great deal of credit for his work in future endeavors dealing with physics.”
While I didn’t mention it here, I did review the bizarre anthology Little Penny Dreadfuls: A Collection of 99 Stories of 99 Words at The Slaughtered Bird .

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

CoaR Review of The Nephilim and the False Prophet

Nev Murray, proprietor of Confessions of a Reviewer!!, the best book review site on the internet, has reviewed my novel The Nephilim and the False Prophet:

I have been sitting staring at my screen for about an hour now because I don’t know where to start with this one. I quite honestly do not know how to describe this book in a review. An epic? A masterpiece? Those are certainly words that spring to mind. One thing is for certain though, no matter what I write down here, and you read over the next few minutes, can ever do this book, and indeed this entire story, any sort of justice and give it the credit it deserves.

Clearly Mr. Murray found things to like in the book. Click on over to read the full review!

CoaR Interview With Dave Dubrow, Part Two

It still is quite an honor to be featured on Nev Murray’s Confessions of a Reviewer!!; I can’t believe anyone would be interested enough in the prosaic insanity that is my life to ask questions about it. In Part Two, we conclude the interview with questions about the Armageddon trilogy and Nev’s dreaded Ten Confessions: ten gut-check questions that you want to run away from, but can’t. He just pins you with those eyes of his and you have no choice but to confess.

Confession Question 1: Who would you view as your main competitor in the writing world?

I have no competitors. Not that I’m terribly original, it’s just that I’m doing my own thing and other writers do their own things, and I treasure every reader. If my work stands out, it’s because I take a point of view in my religious-themed horror that’s respectful to Christianity and appreciates the breadth of thought and consideration behind Christian apologetics. Without me being a Christian, even. Louis Pasteur, Michael Faraday, and C.S. Lewis weren’t unsophisticated, Bible-thumping buffoons: they were brilliant, learned men who had an abiding belief in God. People of faith get a bad rap today, especially in fiction, which is unfortunate.

Things get much darker from there. Click on over and get reading!

CoaR Interview With Dave Dubrow, Part One

I’m really humbled and honored to have been interviewed by Nev Murray, proprietor of Confessions of a Reviewer!!. Nev is the hardest-working book reviewer I know, and he has a gift for getting you to open up about things you might otherwise keep to yourself. Here’s an excerpt of Part One of the interview he conducted with yours truly:

CoaR – Philadelphia then Colorado then Florida. Were you on the run from something or just like to travel? Where is your favourite?

DD – I moved to the mountains of Colorado as a younger man because it was a massive life change that scared me, and the only way you grow as a person is to do things that make you uncomfortable, even frightened.

It was there that I met my wife and started a family. As the years passed, we found that we missed the beach (my wife’s also a former East Coaster), so when a career opportunity beckoned that took us to warmer climes and proximity to the ocean, we jumped at the chance. My favorite place to live is anywhere with my wife and little boy, so I’m always lucky.

There’s quite a bit more, including discussion of my writing process, how I keep track of my ideas, my thoughts on indie publishing, and other bits of interest. Click on over to Confessions of a Reviewer!! to read Part One, and come back tomorrow for Part Two!

Friday Links: Purity, Bituminous Coal, and The Plague of Zombies

Amazingly, it doesn’t appear that any celebrities have died this week. While you’re celebrating that, take a look back at what happened over the last several days in the world of the strange, bizarre, and horrific.

Jon’s Random Acts of Geekery brought us some sci-fi pulp covers that demand your attention. There’s a topless Lamia (SFW), an unhappy-looking cat with blue eyes, and a big green guy who may be a god.
In addition to it being Nev Murray’s blogiversary, the indefatigable Mr. Murray reviewed William Malmborg’s novel Santa Took Them at Confessions of a Reviewer!! : “William Malmborg never makes things that simple though. I am not going to give anymore away in the plot but I will tell you there are more twists and turns in this story than the biggest roller coaster in the world! Just when you think the story is going in one direction and you have it all figured out, Mr Malmborg pulls the rug from under your feet, wraps you up in it and throws you down a very big hill, until you hit the bottom and fall out with your eyes spinning in your head!”
Silent-P reviewed the 2005 film Cry_Wolf at The Slaughtered Bird : “Who doesn’t love a masked slasher mystery? Bunch of kids get together, tell scary stories, get into fights, sleep with each other and slowly get picked off one by one by someone, who, more than likely, is one of them. It’s a formula that’s been tried and tested, repeated and plagiarised. Some pull it off well, others not so much.”
Something a little different from the standard monster fare fell out of Zombos’ Closet , but it’s definitely worth a good look: “What’s intriguing in this advertisement for the bituminous coal industry are the use of the stereotypical 1950s housewife taking some serious umbrage from the Puritans, and the small-print patriotic blurb that reads “The contributions of the Bituminous Coal Industry are typical of the many ways in which the people benefit when business enterprise is allowed to operate freely as it is in the U.S.A.”” I know, I know. Look at it anyway: it’s hysterical.
A home in Indiana that reportedly housed demonically-possessed children has been demolished: “The residence, in Gary, Indiana, was destroyed two weeks by Zak Bagans, a host and producer of the show Ghost Adventures. It was filmed for a documentary he plans to release later this year. Bagans bought the home back in 2014 for $35,000 after Latoya Ammons reported that she and her three children had been possessed by demons while living there, a claim which was later backed up by members of the local police department and workers from the Indiana Department of Child Services.”
At one of my favorite places on the internet, the unmissable R’lyeh Tribune , Sean Eaton deconstructed Thomas Ligotti’s Purity: “The intricately balanced, symmetrical structure of the story is impressive. In Daniel’s family, father-and-son and mother-and-daughter are dyads that exist in completely separate worlds that do not communicate. By the end of the story, there is a victim left in the basement of both houses, bereft of cash, sanity, and in one case, life. Both families have to flee to new houses as a result of horrific events, a process the author implies will occur again and again in the future.”
Horror Movie a Day analyzed the 1966 Hammer horror film The Plague of Zombies: “Indeed, the film has a vague Frankenstein-esque feel at time, particularly Frankenstein Created Woman, as it also has a scene where a girl is terrorized by local thugs and shares that film’s teacher/student relationship between the two male leads. However it should be noted this one came first, so maybe they were just borrowing elements for Frankenstein instead of Plague using familiar/successful material to fall back on as they waded into new territory with the undead.”
If it’s boobs you’re looking for, go no further than to visit Anything Horror ‘s review of Scout’s Guide to the Zombie Apocalypse: “SCOUTS GUIDE TO THE ZOMBIE APOCALYPSE begins where so many zombie films before it began—in a laboratory. It is night time and the majority of scientists are gone. Left in one lab is a researcher burning the midnight oil and a goofy janitor, Ron (Blake Anderson), who you may recognize from Comedy Central’s WORKAHOLICS). Ron screws up big time and accidentally releases the subject that the scientist was working on, who I’m sure you already guessed is infected with a zombie virus.”
Too Much Horror Fiction reviewed Lawrence Block’s novel Ariel: “Roberta and David Jardell live in an expensive old home in tony Charleston, South Carolina, with their adopted 12-year-old daughter Ariel and newborn son Caleb. Despite living a charmed life, all is not well: since the unexpected conception of Caleb, Roberta has withdrawn from Ariel, who strikes her more and more as an unlovable, unfathomable child, somewhat wiser than her years.”
Here , I pointed you to a book review I wrote at The Slaughtered Bird and gave European women unsolicited advice about how to not get raped.

Illustration by Tom Sullivan for Call of Cthulhu’s Cthulhu Classics supplement.

Where the Boys Are(n’t): How to Not Get Raped

Over the last several months, Arab and North African immigrants have been attacking women (and children) in Germany, Sweden, and other places in Europe. Some of these women have been groped, others groped and robbed, and yet others groped, robbed, and raped.

Before we discuss this issue, we need to stipulate a few things:

Everyone should have the right to walk anywhere in the world without fear of assault. But the world doesn’t work that way, so we have to deal.
It’s not racism or Islamophobia to point out that Arab and North African Muslims have perpetrated the lion’s share of attacks. Facts are facts. We can talk about cultural differences between western women and Arab Muslim men all day, but, to quote William Henry III, “It is scarcely the same thing to put a man on the moon as to put a bone in your nose.” We have, in the West, standards of behavior that supersede cultural differences, including abhorrence and criminalization of rape. Western culture and mores are superior to all others, particularly those in which rape is considered acceptable.
The Europeans brought this immigrant rape crisis on themselves. It’s foolish to think that there wouldn’t be some sort of consequence to the mass importation of thousands and thousands and thousands of foreign people to your country who don’t share your language, culture, or morals.

Rather than pretending that this problem doesn’t exist, let’s see what we can do to help those who have to live with it.

When considering your personal defense, the first thing to do, no matter what, is not be where assaults are most likely to occur. It’s fun to discuss the tactic of retention shooting in an extreme close-quarters situation, especially against multiple assailants, but gun laws across the EU are far more restrictive than in the U.S., so it’s moot. The average German hausfrau isn’t going to whip out a Glock 19 on a mob of horny, unemployed immigrants and start putting holes into kneecaps. And even if you do carry a firearm, why go to a place where you’re likely to be victimized unless you absolutely have to? Isn’t that asking for a gunfight? Responsible people avoid unnecessary physical altercations.

The police chief of Vienna, Austria was pilloried when he said, “Women should in general not go out on the streets at night alone, they should avoid suspicious looking areas and also when in pubs and clubs should only accept drinks from people they know.”

Why was this a problem? Why is this victim-blaming? Now that we know that gangs of immigrants are assaulting young European women, why should these women not take precautions to defend themselves? Top Viennese cop Gerhard Pürstl is absolutely right. Your personal safety is your responsibility, and you need to be proactive in your own defense. Don’t be where groups of young, unemployed immigrants congregate. When you see crowds of them, go in the other direction. Nobody on this planet can teleport or be invisible, so your assailant has to have been somewhere before he attacked you. Look around. Be aware, alert, and avoidant, and your chances of being attacked lessen significantly.

(Yes, I’m toeing the line that got John Derbyshire canned from National Review, but I haven’t crossed it.)

We have to get past what should be and deal with what is. If the Europeans don’t like how they have to modify their behavior to keep from getting victimized, they need to discuss that with their elected representatives. This is an entirely self-created problem, but it’s not insurmountable. They just have to have the courage to implement a solution.

Until then, don’t go out alone. Always carry at least one weapon and practice accessing and deploying it under duress. Nobody else in the world cares more about your safety than you do, so take it seriously and act accordingly. It’s a dangerous world out there, but if you take reasonable precautions, you don’t have to live in fear.

The Slaughtered Bird Book Review: The Order of the Dragon

The awesome horror site The Slaughtered Bird has published my review of Phil Hore’s horror novel The Order of the Dragon:

The first in a trilogy of novels by Australian author Phil Hore, The Order of the Dragon introduces us to two very different characters: the learned, dryly humorous Amun Galeus, and his hulking friend Sebastian Vulk. While this might sound like standard bickering buddies fare, the novel doesn’t descend into cliché: it’s a fun, pulp horror piece that starts off slow, but once it hits its stride, rockets like a freight train.

Click to find out why you should add this novel to your reading list.

Friday Links: The Witch Room, The Orange Man, and the Dog-Faced Tribes of Russia

It’s a new week, a new site, and a new Friday Links, so let’s get after it.

Nev Murray got a very nice gift from author Jason Parent at his Confessions of a Reviewer!!
Some pastors are concerned about Fox’s upcoming Exorcist television series: “The Bible is abundantly clear about the existence of the demonic realm,” says Carl Gallups, pastor of Hickory Hammock Baptist Church in Milton, Florida. “Regardless what one believes about the reality of the demonic, it cannot be denied that the world is faced with unmitigated evil staring us in the face every day.'”
As usual, something very cool crept out of Zombos’ Closet : Monsters, from Wonder Books: “Part of the 7900 Series for Wonder Books, which covered “television personalities/programs or fictional characters” (Wikipedia), this softcover children’s book features abridged versions of The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Frankenstein, and Dracula by Walter Gibson (writer of the Shadow pulp magazine) and is illustrated by Dell and Charlton comic book artist Tony Tallarico.”
Sean Eaton discussed Clark Ashton Smith’s Master of the Asteroid at his brain-expanding, always-fascinating R’lyeh Tribune : “Master of the Asteroid has two narrators, each providing a dramatic contrast with the other: rational detachment in the one and a soul-destroying desperation in the other.  The first narrator is a disinterested investigator and space historian.  He relates the daunting history of mankind’s early attempts to colonize the solar system—which amounts to a series of gruesome disasters with few survivors.”
Have you heard of the movie Bloody Indulgent: A Raunchy Vampire Musical? Me neither, but Taliesin Meets the Vampires reviewed it: “Inside Connie is doing her song, when she notices that Todd is now a vampire. The song stops and she eventually changes it to a chant of “Kill the f*cking vampire” aimed at Burt (now in the club). Sid intervenes but Burt attacks him and then there is general mayhem, during which Todd turns Connie.”
Ghost Hunting Theories told us about the dog-faced tribes of Russia: “In fact, a great deal of Medieval texts carry the theme of there being such dog-headed people who could be gentle if treated gently and turn ruthless and grotesquely angry if incited. Where do these legends from pre-biblical times, the Bible, and even into the Medieval Ages originate from?”
At The Slaughtered Bird , LastBoneStands reviewed the 2015 movie The Orange Man: “The title and the premise seems like it could make for an original horror comedy that would have just the right amount of cheese to satisfy the “B-movie” fans out there. A group of middle-age men go on a camping trip and run into a disgruntled orange farmer, who just happens to be a serial killer. A disgruntled orange farmer? Yes. A disgruntled orange farmer. It sounded like a great time to me. I figured I’d kick back, have a laugh and watch people get beaten to death with a sack of oranges. Both of these things did happen, however, there was more to this film than that.”
Die, Monster, Die!, an attempt to bring Lovecraftian themes to film in 1965, was the subject of discussion at Breakfast in the Ruins : ” ‘Die Monster Die!’ is an odd one and no mistake. Not ‘odd’ in a good way necessarily, but it is certainly one of the strangest and most thematically unglued of AIP’s ‘60s horror films – a drifting and uncertain production that quickly loses sight of whatever point it was trying to make and never really regains it, despite some diverting moments of all-out weirdness.”
Late last year I pointed you to a trailer for a movie called Jeruzalem that looked interesting. The movie itself received a sound thrashing at The Horror Club : “So not only is Jeruzalem a Found Footage flick, which presents its own set of unique problems, but it’s one that felt the need to jump on the “technology appearing on-screen” bandwagon, which does it no favors either.” I’ll still probably see it.
Ramblings from the Black Lagoon wrote an interesting short story titled The Witch Room: “I’m not the type of man who typically keeps a diary or journal, but I feel that I must put these thoughts down while I still can. In some ways, I’m just trying to have some tangible trace of these events, which seem almost dreamlike when I ponder them for any length of time. No…not dreamlike…nightmarish is more fitting.”
Reaching back to 1973, Cool Ass Cinema discussed the TV movie A Cold Night’s Death: “This chilling slice of isolation horror is among the best examples of TV terror and, unfortunately, one that is buried in obscurity. Two scientists are alone at a remote polar outpost where space exploratory experiments are conducted on chimps; only there’s something else inside the station with them. The suspense and impending dread mounts as quickly as the piles of snow dumped by a merciless blizzard.”
Here , I announced the launch of my new site and interviewed RM Huffman, author of Leviathan.

Illustration by Alain Gassner for Stormbringer’s Rogue Mistress supplement.

Interview With R.M. Huffman

I very much enjoyed R.M. Huffman’s novel Leviathan: Book One of the Antediluvian Legacy, and it was an honor to have the opportunity to ask Dr. Huffman some questions about his life, his work, and his faith, all of which figure prominently in his writing.

You’re a practicing physician, writer, illustrator, husband, and father of four small children. How do you find time to create?

I started writing the book that became Leviathan when I was an intern. Every few days I’d be post-call, which means I’d have most of the day off after spending the night at the hospital, and – this is the key part – I can’t take naps. I’ve just never been able to do it. Writing turned out to be a relaxing sort of thing I could do while resting on the couch, sometimes with a baby sleeping on me, and at some point during my residency I had done enough of it that I had an entire manuscript. These days, the writing is a bit lower on the priority list and gets done a couple hundred words at a time, early in the morning or late at night or if I have a long break between cases. It’s slow going, but it goes, and I’ve written 75K+ words in the sequel (and about 10K in book 3). The cliched-but-true moral of this story: if I can do this, anybody can.

You’ve mentioned C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien as influences on your world-building. Who are some of your other favorite fantasy authors?

My favorite current (urban) fantasy series is The Dresden Files, by Jim Butcher. His world-building is top-notch, and he’s kept it consistently entertaining for fourteen or fifteen books now. Robert E. Howard’s Conan stories probably have the most “pre-flood world” flavor of any well-known fantasy setting, but my favorite character of his is Solomon Kane, whose somber, no-nonsense Puritanical attitude and wandering monster-killing ways probably seeped into Noah’s characterization, especially in book 2.

If there’s anything philosophical or theological you’d like readers to take away from Leviathan, what would it be?

That the plain text of Genesis 2 through 6 is completely fascinating and deserving of more interest and study than it gets now, which is virtually nil. Also, half-angel giants riding dinosaurs is almost certainly a thing that really happened.

How far do you plan to take The Antediluvian Legacy series? To the building of the Ark?  The Flood and beyond? 

The series is planned to be a trilogy, and book 3 will include the building of the ark, the flood, and the immediate aftermath. The last third or so of the book will be the “Noah’s ark” narrative that’s familiar to most people, but hopefully with an emotional and historical context that will make it more harrowing and compelling than the typical smiling, white-bearded-man-with-happy-giraffes Sunday School version of the story.

You’ve made many of the Naphil characters in Leviathan decent, moral people, but the Lord sends the Flood, in part, to clear the world of Nephilim.  How can the modern reader square God’s erasing of the Nephilim from the Earth with the idea that the Nephilim are not responsible for their parentage?  Doesn’t that seem unjust?

The Nephilim are described as “heroes of old, men of renown,” so I felt like it was reasonable, at least initially, to depict them as such. Now, because of the worldwide judgment of the flood, we know that they eventually become irredeemably evil, but so did everyone else. I get into this in the books, but I do think that there were probably a great many pre-flood folks, Nephilim included, who clung faithfully to a God-fearing morality and were killed for it, much like Christians under Nero or Jews in the Holocaust or [pick another of many awful examples throughout history]. Anyway, I don’t believe that the Nephilim were necessarily condemned by their parentage (at least, the text of Genesis doesn’t state such a thing). It does seem that a driving motivation for Joshua-era Israel’s mandate to destroy the inhabitants of the promised land could have been that many of them were of the “…and also afterwards” Nephilim ilk (Rephaim, Emim, Zamzummin, Anakim – see Deuteronomy chapter 2), but even then, cultural depravity was likely the main (or only) factor. However it ultimately went down, I know that 1) God is perfectly just, 2) Genesis 6 gives very little specific information about either the Nephilim or the global depravity that demanded that a just God destroy the earth, which means that 3) despite any semblance of unfairness, if we had complete information about the societal milieu and individual behaviors of the antediluvian world immediately preceding the flood, we would have no doubt that destroying the world was a just God’s only option. In fact, that’s going to be the challenge in the third book: how does one depict a world that becomes so bad that the reader feels a sense of massive relief and cathartic satisfaction when the flood judgment finally does come? Hint: it’ll be a bit worse than “Noah’s neighbors make fun of him while he’s building the ark.”

Many people consider Creationism to be anti-science.  How do you reconcile being a practicing anesthesiologist and a Creationist?

This deserves a 10,000 word answer that encompasses epistemology, the original text of Genesis, the nature of “macro-” versus “micro-” evolution, and the history of scientific philosophy beginning with James Hutton and uniformitarianism, but I’ll just hit the high points. An “evolutionary biologist” is a scientist in the sense that someone fluent in Orcish or Klingon is a philologist, and the works of Richard Dawkins are comparable to Rudyard Kipling’s Just So Stories. It’s worth noting the difference between empirical science (experimental, measurable, repeatable, responsible for antibiotics and airplanes) and historical science (data is interpreted within an axiomatic paradigm). Whether one is a creationist or a Darwinist depends not on evidence, but interpretation of the evidence, which becomes a philosophical matter, not a scientific one. As a Christian, my axiom is “the Bible is authoritative in every respect,” and its explanatory power as relates to everything from natural history to human behavior is immensely satisfactory. As far as Biblical creation being an idea that’s “anti-science,” the following people would disagree: Newton, Kepler, Mendel, Pasteur, Pascal, Cuvier, Faraday, Kelvin, Boyle, Linnaeus, and Francis Bacon, who came up with the concept of the modern scientific method in the first place. Anesthesiology is a pragmatic medical specialty (for example, do you know how modern volatile anesthetic gas works? Neither does anybody else, but it does! Hooray for the Manhattan project, where its chemistry was developed!) and not particularly beholden to belief about origins, but as a physician, I’ll say this: the idea that the self-replicating, self-healing, autoregulating, sentient machine that is the human body is a product of chance mutations of a spontaneously-arising functional DNA/protein interface is scientific nonsense. Mutations cause trisomies and cancer, and the number of known mutations that have been found to be both beneficial to survival and additive to a genome is exactly zero. A Creator with intelligence beyond our capacity to comprehend is the only reasonable conclusion; in fact, Francis Crick, co-discoverer of DNA, strongly rejected belief in God but had such a problem with the materialistic origin of life that he ended up espousing panspermia, the idea that life on earth was seeded by aliens.

So, that was only like a 5,000 word answer. Even shorter: it isn’t hard, and those people are silly.

What were the hardest parts of the novel to write?  The easiest?

Hardest: romantic stuff. Easiest: violent encounters between prehistoric beasts and people with cool weapons.

Tell us about your Sweet Tooth series.  Are you more comfortable writing that sort of lighthearted humor than the serious material in Leviathan?

Sweet Tooth originated from the (hilarious!) idea that the glucose-laden blood of an uncontrolled diabetic would be like candy to a vampire. I wrote the story, I was highly entertained by doing so, and I did five more with the same character. They’re sort of urban fantasy/horror with, yes, lighthearted humor, each one with a different holiday theme. I did find them easier to write, actually. With these, I didn’t have to worry about anachronisms or avoiding modern idioms or creating a fantasy setting, and with a protagonist who’s a sarcastic vampire doctor and myself being two out of three of those, I pretty much just used my own voice. I’m biased, of course, but I have to say, I think most people would like them and find them to be subversively clever.

When Noah speaks, do you imagine him having the voice of John Huston in The Bible: In the Beginning… or Russell Crowe in Noah? 

Great question. I’m honestly not sure, but I figure I’ll find out when Mel Gibson, bringing his Braveheart/Passion of the Christ/Apocalypto directorial sensibilities and playing the part of Methuselah, casts the Antediluvian Legacy movies (filmed back-to-back-to-back, of course).

Relaunch!

As you can see, I’ve moved to an independently-hosted server and off of blogspot. Blogspot is a great blogging platform, but I wanted to have a place of my own, something a bit cleaner and more professional.

Never fear: the blog’s content will not change. I’ve just moved into a better apartment.

I hope you’ll continue to visit and become part of the discussion. As always, we’ll delve into subjects both trivial and consequential, and even move into uncomfortable territory every once in a while. Growth and understanding come from effort, not ease.

Thanks for coming. We’ll talk again soon.