David Dubrow's Blog, page 4

Attack from Planet B Review: Botoks

When the much-missed horror site The Slaughtered Bird closed its doors, the site’s proprietor, with my enthusiastic permission, gave my oeuvre of book and movie reviews to the site Attack from Planet B, who, over time, has been reposting them. This includes older gems like the unbelievably awful slasher flick Red Christmas, for example. Sometimes giving a terrible movie a negative review is revenge for wasting my time.

In appreciation for Attack from Planet B rescuing my reviews from (perhaps deserved) oblivion, I’ve agreed to watch and review a new spate of independent and/or foreign films. My newest is a review of the Polish medical drama Botoks:

The clumsy, shrill feminist message running throughout the film is undercut by the plot. A female urologist’s husband tells her that he wants a divorce because he finds her vagina hideous to look at. He even uses the term “beef curtains.” (I don’t know if that’s an exact translation; all I can do is read the subtitles.) Later that day, the understandably unsettled doctor with the unappealing genitals insists that a male patient provide a semen sample by masturbating in front of her. After she gets fired for this piece of questionable professional behavior, she becomes a pioneer in vaginal plastic surgery, and even has her own female parts prettified. Today’s woke feminism would, no doubt, have her shouting her pride in her, ah, “beef curtains” instead of having them adjusted according to sexist male standards of attractiveness.

Please read this review. PLEASE. Don’t let my suffering go unwitnessed.

Appalling Stories 4 Is Live!

I’m pleased to announce that the latest installment of the Appalling Stories series is live and ready for purchase in the Amazon store.

Appalling Stories 4: Even More Appalling Tales of Social Injustice is an anthology that gathers together some of the most skilled writers in independent publishing to tell outrageous stories that traditional publishing wouldn’t touch with a ten-foot pole.

With Woke Progressivism corroding every American cultural institution, there’s only one place to find the best of the new literary counterculture, and that’s here: the Appalling Stories series.

In Appalling Stories 4, we skewer the left’s sacred cows and make burgers from the carcasses. You’ll find tales of hilarious Hollywood degeneracy, disturbing dystopias, Green New Deals gone black, old-school treasure-hunting, and much more. Triggering, microaggressions, macroaggressions, punching down, punching up, punching Antifa: like the old spaghetti sauce commercial says, it’s in there.

And it’s all fun to read. We’re not preachers or pundits: we’re entertainers, and we keep you on the edge of your seat, glued to every page.

Just don’t ask us to unstick you.

Featuring an exclusive foreword by Denise McAllister, cultural commentator and author of What Men Want to Say to Women (But Can’t).

You’ll laugh, you’ll grimace, you’ll shake your head in amazement. No matter what, you won’t be the same after reading Appalling Stories 4.

Interview Resurrection: Adam Howe

Some time ago, I conducted an interview with Adam Howe on the late, much-missed horror site The Slaughtered Bird. I’m honored to have an Adam Howe short story in the upcoming anthology Appalling Stories 4: Even More Appalling Tales of Social Injustice; Adam generously gave me the inspiration for tales throughout the Appalling Stories series. He’s the funniest writer I personally know, and one of the most skilled. What follows is an interview with Adam, focusing on his books Black Cat Mojo and Die Dog or Eat the Hatchet, his screenwriting past, action movies past and present, and what he likes to read.

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Dubrow: The stories in your collections Black Cat Mojo and Die Dog or Eat the Hatchet are set in the American South.  Why did you pick that area as a setting?

Howe: My South was never intended to be an accurate depiction of life below the Mason-Dixon line.  It’s a pop culture South.  A Brit’s interpretation of junk ‘Murricana.  I’ve never visited the South – wouldn’t want to visit MY South – in fact, I’ve visited the States for all of a weekend, when I met Stephen King in NYC after winning his On Writing contest.  When it comes to location, I’m less interested in specifics, than I am in mood and atmosphere, and the American South has that in spades.  To me, the South has a mythic quality that suits my hyperreal style.  I can write the most outlandish shit, set it in the South, and it becomes borderline plausible.  I recently read a ‘weird news’ headline about a meth-head who fought fifteen cops while masturbating.  (Presumably he was resisting arrest one-handed.)  Now I just read the headline, so I don’t have all the details – but tell me that doesn’t sound like a Southern crime?  And that I shouldn’t write about it?  And that you wouldn’t read it?  I also love the rhythm of the Southern accent, and the Southerner’s colorful turn of phrase.  For some reason – too many movies, I guess – this cracker raconteur is the loudest of the voices I hear when I’m writing.  It’s getting to the point where I’m losing my British accent.

Dubrow: You’ve spent years writing screenplays and script doctoring.  Tell us about that experience and how it relates to your writing as a whole.

Howe: In my early teens, I wrote screenplay reviews for a mail-order company that sold screenplays to colleges, budding screenwriters and the like.  Back in the pre-digital age, this was about the only way to obtain produced screenplays in the UK.  I learned the craft by reading a shit-ton of screenplays – particularly dug Shane Black’s stuff – I seemed to have a knack for writing visually and decided screenwriting was how I wanted to waste my life.

In my twenties, I landed a screenwriting agent at a not-great agency where I ‘enjoyed’ middling success.  I had a few original screenplays optioned and scraped a few bucks doctoring other writers’ work.  But nothing I wrote ever made it to the screen, and so much work was left to just gather dust, that finally it all became too disheartening, and I made the decision to return to writing prose fiction.

The best I can say is that my years as a screenwriter taught me a lot in terms of story structure, gave me my cinematic style, and left me with a healthy cynicism for the film industry.  I’d still love to see my work adapted for the screen, but I won’t chase it anymore.  I’m more than satisfied that my work is finally reaching readers.  And better yet, that people seem to dig it.

Dubrow: I’ve noticed that your style embraces a kind of hyperrealism where the bizarre becomes natural and the story grows out of that strangeness, like magical realism without the magic.  Have you considered working with supernatural themes, and if so, which ones grab you?

Howe: I’d agree that my work’s hyperreal – in the mould of (say) Tarantino and the Coens – where everything’s plausible within the world of the story.  One of my readers, referring to the scene in Damn Dirty Apes in which the gonzo pornographers are shooting their skunk ape porno, said I have a knack for making the extraordinary seem ordinary.  I think that was a compliment.

I find myself moving further away from the horror genre and more towards crime fiction, in my reading as much as my writing.  I prefer human monsters and real-world horrors.  For me, the best of both worlds is the supernatural noir of John Connelly – would love to write his kinda stuff, but I don’t think that’s where my talent lies…

I do have a few traditional (ish) ‘supernatural’ projects in the pipeline.  It’ll be interesting to see how those stories are received.  I can’t give away many details right now.  All I’ll say is that I’m an old wine / new bottle kinda writer.  I enjoy subverting tropes.  It lures the reader into a false sense of security.

Dubrow: Aside from yourself, are there any other writers out there who you can’t believe aren’t on the NYT bestseller list?

Howe: Nah, just me, fuck ‘em… I’m kidding, of course.  To be honest, I don’t follow the bestseller lists so I couldn’t tell you who is and isn’t there.  Naturally all the great writers who have blurbed my books belong there.  And I’ll tip my hat to Adam Cesare.  Here’s an exclusive for you: Cesare and I are currently collaborating on a crime/horror project.  Details remain top secret at the moment, but we’re excited about what we’re cooking up.  Or cocking up.  Remains to be seen, I guess.  If we fuck it up, I’ll blame Cesare and go back to what I know, write that guaranteed bestseller about the masturbating cop-fighter.

Dubrow: You’ve already described how you won Stephen King’s On Writing contest some time ago; what do you think the horror genre would look like today if the King of Horror hadn’t taken up the craft?

Howe: These things are cyclical.  Not to devalue King’s work – talent like his will always out – but no doubt another writer would have filled the void left by King’s major influences: Matheson, Bradbury, Bloch.  And today we’d probably still be enduring shitty rip-offs of that guy’s work!  A more interesting question – I’ll just pose my own Q’s, thanks – is to wonder how King would fare as an emerging writer in today’s market.  A slim book like Carrie would be considered a novella.  It’s hard to imagine it would’ve found a home with the majors.  So he makes his bones with the indie press.  Which book promotes him to the majors?  Salem’s Lot?  The Dead Zone?  The Shining?  It cannot be underestimated how fortunate King was to have DePalma direct Carrie.  The huge success of the movie brought King to mainstream attention and had the knock-on effect of boosting his book sales.  Of course, it didn’t hurt that King followed Carrie with classic after classic after classic.  But as great a writer as King is, he’s intrinsically linked to the movie adaptations of his work.  We see Jack Nicholson as Jack Torrance and even King himself posts social media pictures of Tim Curry’s Pennywise.  That film industry just doesn’t exist anymore and it’s hard to imagine another horror writer enjoying the same success today.  Great question… Mine, I mean.

Dubrow: Name the last three movies that moved you to tears.  Tears of laughter don’t count.

Howe: Only three, huh?  Jesus, Dubrow – what the hell do you take me for?

Honestly: I was recently prescribed medication that’s left me with the emotional range of a Chuck Norris performance, so this one’s harder to answer than it used to be, when I’d find myself welling up at saccharine TV commercials… Alright, here we go:

Sly Stallone’s “Nothing is over!” monologue at the end of First Blood.

The death of Hooch in Turner & Hooch.

Steven Seagal’s stirring environmental lecture at the end of On Deadly Ground.

Dubrow: Speaking of laughter, you use comedy to great effect in the stories Of Badgers & Porn Dwarfs and Damn Dirty Apes.  Horror comedy is a notoriously difficult thing to pull off.  Are you more comfortable trying to get laughs than elicit scares?  Why?

Howe: I enjoy reading dark fiction, the darker the better, but I like a few laughs along the way, ditto.  Discovering Joe Lansdale was a revelation for me: Not only did I appreciate the way he danced so deftly between light and darkness, I felt I could do a similar thing in my work… Of course, comedy’s subjective.  When I wrote Of Badgers & Porn Dwarfs, it was very different from my ‘straighter’ early work.  I had no idea how it would be received.  In retrospect, it could have gone horribly wrong, and I might’ve chosen a subtler story to kick-off my first collection.  All I knew was that I found it funny.  Fortunately others seem to share my sick sense of humour, so at least I’ll have company in hell.

My novella Die Dog or Eat the Hatchet contains fewer laughs.  That was a deliberate decision.  I wanted to show readers I’ve got a little more game than just donkey-dicked porn dwarfs.  I found Die Dog much harder and far less enjoyable to write than Damn Dirty Apes.  It’s a grueling story, and I wasn’t sure it even worked at first.  In fact, I was so unsure about Die Dog that I wrote the other two stories in the collection just to hedge my bets.  So yeah, I guess you could say I’m more comfortable writing humour than ‘straight’ horror.  The immediacy of a laugh is reassuring.  There’s less room for doubt.  Funny’s funny.

Dubrow: Let’s talk about action movies.  The 1980s through the early-mid 1990s were very much the Golden Age of action films.  Why is that, and why do you think today’s action films lack punch, despite their massive budgets?

Howe: Shit, where to start?  The best of the Golden Age – the likes of Die Hard, Lethal Weapon, Predator, Robocop; non-superhero male fantasy films – were well-crafted genre flicks, scripted by solid writers like Shane Black and Steven DeSouza.  Even the lesser films – Roadhouse, Cobra, Stone Cold – remain guilty pleasures due to their unapologetic dick-swinging, iffy politics and mullet hairstyles.  Today’s action movies – blockbusters in general – are written by committee.  That’s always been true to an extent, but you can feel it today more than ever.  There’s too much box ticking, too much pandering to demographics and market trends.  In trying to please everybody, no one’s left satisfied…least of all we Children of the Golden Age, who remember a better, manlier time.

CGI has all but killed the modern action movie.  The Golden Age flicks were at least borderline believable, with the genuine spectacle of in-camera action that risked, and sometimes cost stuntmen their lives – a maimed stuntman is the very least I ask of an action movie.  Today’s action movies?  Explosions, car chases and even muzzle flash in shootouts is computer-generated.  Can you imagine how the shootout in Heat, or a Peckinpah gunfight would look today?  If it’s gonna look like a video game, I’d prefer just to play a video game – at least Grand Theft Auto doesn’t skimp on the violence.  I feel sorry for the kids being served this watered-down, ball-less bullshit.  The hard-R violence of Golden Age action movies used to be a boy’s rite of passage into manhood.  It didn’t do ME any harm, I’m sure you’ll agree.

Today’s viewer – according to Hollywood, at least – is too cynical to accept the action stars and tough guy actors of the past.  Where have the tough guys gone?  Jason Statham?  Wake up, America!  When one of ‘your’ biggest action stars is a Brit, you’ve shit the bed.  The Rock?  Could’ve/should’ve been the new Schwarzenegger, churning out 80s-era Arnie-style films.  Instead he played it PG13 and pandered to the rassling fans… Today we get Oscar winners boot-camping for a role, or wearing a fucking cape; we get Old Man Neeson making Seagal flicks in everything but name; we get Hollywood trying to mold one of the Twilight punks into an androgynous ass-kicker… Today’s audience is also too quick to offend, and Hollywood shit-scared of demonizing certain ticket-buying demographics.  This has created a lack of clearly defined villains.  We’re not allowed to boo the bad guy anymore!  Big problem right there, folks.  No heroes and villains…

I’m being slightly facetious in my answers here, of course.  But it’s hard to imagine the ‘yoot’ of today will be waxing nostalgic about their entertainment as we do ours.  Everything’s so cookie-cutter and forgettable – what’s to remember?

I’ll be addressing a lot of this stuff in my eagerly-awaited, long-gestating, white whale of a novel, One Tough Bastard, concerning the misadventures of faded 80s action star, Shane Moxie.

Dubrow: Other than horror and crime, are there other genres you like to read?

Howe: I read some non-fiction.  A little history, biographies, film/literary criticism.  Juggs magazine for the articles.  But everything I read is usually related in some way to the crime/horror genres.  If I read outside the genres, it’s often for research.  What can I say?  I like what I like.

Dubrow: In a bare-knuckle brawl, who would win: Martin Riggs, Max Cady, or Casey Ryback?  Think carefully.

Howe: Think carefully, he says.  Dubrow, I’ve been preparing for this question my whole life.  Now without being unkind to Mr. Seagal, I think it’s fair to say Casey Ryback holds a significant weight advantage over Riggs and Cady.  And Max Cady?  Seriously?  A rapist versus a loose cannon cop or a Navy SEAL?  So that leaves us Riggs vs. Ryback.  Riggs apparently forgot his martial arts training between the Joshua and Vordstedt fights of Lethal Weapons 1 and 2 respectively.  And what was Riggs’s style, anyway?  If memory serves, Murtaugh refers to it only as ‘that kung fu shit.’  Whatever it is, this fight is a total mismatch.  Ryback fucks up Riggs BAD.

(INTERVIEWER’S NOTE: I must express my strong disagreement with the quality of Mr. Howe’s answer in the final question. Clearly, Max Cady would come out on top in any brawl on sheer toughness alone. While he may not have Ryback or Riggs’s size, he has the brutal, hard-core experience of having spent the last several years in a maximum-security prison. Neither Ryback nor Riggs have had to survive as many day-to-day sharpened bedspring shankings, cafeteria tray bludgeonings, and unwanted amorous advances in an all-male shower room as Max Cady, and as such their fighting skills wouldn’t hold up.)

Appalling Stories 4 Cover Reveal

The short story anthology Appalling Stories 4: Even More Appalling Tales of Social Injustice will be released in December 2019.

This installment of the series has got a tremendous line-up of authors telling stories that the woke gatekeepers of traditional publishing would find problematic at best, and, well, appalling at worst. From disturbingly hilarious tales of body horror to hardcore action to sci-fi adventure, you’re bound to find something that trips your trigger. Includes my newest story in the world of the Bee-pocalypse, with a first-contact twist that you’ve never seen before!

Here’s a sneak peek at the table of contents:

And here’s the awesome cover, illustrated by J.WAR:

I’m honored that Denise McAllister, cultural commentator and author of What Men Want to Say to Women (But Can’t), wrote such a terrific foreword to this book; she’s incisive, clear-thinking, and a terrific writer.

Appalling Stories 4: Even More Appalling Tales of Social Injustice will be ready in time for the holidays, so save room under the Christmas tree (or next to the menorah) for your copy!

Armageddon: Know Your Drug Dealer

(You are looking at my Chirper feed, aren’t you? It’s like Twitter, but so much better!)

I included stigmata in my Armageddon trilogy because I figured that if you were going to describe a Biblical apocalypse, with demonic possession, angelic visitations, and holy relics, you should also throw in associated supernatural/Judeo-Christian phenomena, like people afflicted with the Wounds of Christ. For storytelling purposes, it wasn’t enough for those with stigmata to just bleed: the agonies they felt also gave them psychic abilities like prognostication and knowing when a holy relic or demonically-possessed person was nearby. The Wounds always hurt, but the pain increased in proximity to the supernatural.

Once I got that squared away, I had to decide who to give these Wounds to. I wanted those afflicted to be a kind of living holy relic, highly sought-after by the forces of both Hell and Heaven. Some religious people would get the stigmata, certainly. But I also wanted to inflict stigmata on other people: ones you might consider undeserving. Unlikely. Non-believers.

To make things interesting, I decided to have my stigmata-afflicted character be a drug dealer, and I named him Ozzie. From the outset, I wanted Ozzie to go from a bad person to a less-bad person. He would become a hero, of sorts, and a believer in Christ through sheer pragmatism. The third book in the trilogy is called The Holy Warrior and the Last Angel for a reason: Ozzie becomes the titular Holy Warrior. The least likely holy warrior you could imagine. A murderer and thief, a peddler of drugs, a gang member who would kill you for looking at him the wrong way, or even the right way. A cruel man who never smiled, not once.

His transformation throughout the novels is something to be read rather than described. But in creating Ozzie, I had to work out who he was. You could just hang a label on someone and call it a day: he’s a killer. A gangbanger. Whatever. But it doesn’t invite you to look deeper, and as I needed Ozzie to be an important character in whose head you’d be staying from time to time, I had to work out his details and background.

Okay, so he’s a drug dealer. What does that mean? Where does he deal drugs? How does he get them? What does a drug deal look like, exactly? It’s not like you go to the mall and pick up crystal meth at a kiosk. And if he’s in a gang, what kind of gang? How is the gang organized? What’s his role in the hierarchy?

I never bought drugs outside of a pharmacy, so I had no personal experience to draw from. So I had to do research. As this is a fictional character who happens to be in a fictional gang, I drew the vast majority of my cues from fiction: books and movies. New Jack City. Training Day. American Gangster. Blood in, Blood Out. Colors. I pored over news articles and interviews of drug dealers in and out of prison. Over time I got a vague picture, but the details eluded me: I couldn’t just borrow characters and situations from other people’s work.

So I had to make it up. I created a New York City drug gang, from the boss of the city to individual territories within certain boroughs. The territory bosses had free rein within their turf, but had to send their monthly cut to the borough boss. Independence with limits. Once I had the hierarchy, I could plug in various characters, who then had their roles to play, including Ozzie.

Some readers told me that they found the gang stuff to be pretty realistic, but I didn’t tell them that I made it up myself, according to how I’d run an illegal drug operation. In the end, it worked: it provided the necessary framework for both character motivations and story, and how things turn out for Ozzie was dependent on how he started out as a territory boss in Brooklyn, New York. Ozzie, being a cunning sort, used his clairvoyance and precognition to great personal advantage until…well, you’ll just have to read about what happened in The Blessed Man and the Witch.

And if writing doesn’t work out, I may have career options in the field of extralegal intoxicant distribution. We’ll see how it goes.

An Update and Two Reviews

Even though I quit using Twitter, it doesn’t mean that you should be robbed of my short, pithy little comments (to be read with a lisp or not, as you like). So I’ve created The Chirper, available on the sidebar. It’s like Twitter, but so much better. Now you can come here and read the contents of my sick, bloated id without having to go anywhere else! I’ll update it throughout the week. (I stole the name Chirper from my son’s favorite program, The Thundermans, which parodied it as a social media platform for teenage girls. As Rosa Blasi said, “Chirp chirp, girlfriend!”)

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The South Korean cop show Tunnel is a K-drama for people who like K-dramas. A little less polished than Possessed, it still has a bizarre charm that draws you in. In an inversion of the British cop show Life on Mars, Tunnel tells the story of a cop in 1986 who is attacked by a serial killer and finds himself sent thirty years into the future, to 2016. There’s an understandable culture shock, particularly concerning the advancements in forensic science in the intervening decades. Some of it’s played for laughs, with inconsistent results. Much of the plot concerns itself with the protagonist dealing with this temporal dislocation, the grief of losing his wife in the past, and trying to catch the same serial killer…or his copycat.

Park Gwang-ho, the time-traveling protagonist, is portrayed as an old-fashioned dinosaur, and his anachronistic way of speaking, acting, and performing his law enforcement duties works well. He’s just clumsy enough to be excused from being subject to assault charges in 2016’s more sensitive times. The actor Choi Jin-Hyuk does a decent job with the role, though his ability to project sadness is a little less convincing.

I call it a K-drama for people who like K-dramas because it takes some dedication to get through the earlier episodes before the show grabs you. Two of the principal characters are amazingly unlikable and opaque, deliberately so, and this tended to be a turn-off until the events of the plot caught up. One character pops in and out without him going anywhere story-wise, which was jarring. Some of the more graphic parts were blurred out for censorship reasons (I imagine), a choice that took one out of the show from time to time.

Despite these quibbles, the show does everything else right. The end is satisfying, the whodunit aspects of finding the serial killer work, and you care what happens to whom. Once you get into it, it gets its hooks into you and won’t let go.

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I’m a bit more ambivalent about the K-drama Life, but that may have something to do with the show’s political/social aspects than its quality. I’m sure I’d appreciate it more if I lived in South Korea or had personal experience with the issues the show brings up, but other online commentary says that its depiction of life in Seoul is accurate.

It’s a medical show, but unlike most American hospital dramas, the focus is less on the patient of the day than it is the power struggle between the medical staff and the new executive brought in to make the hospital more profitable. This emphasis on the bigger picture allows the plot to address ideas like privatization and its attendant changes to medical care with more detail, instead of tacking them onto the beginning and end of each episode the way other dramas might. It would be foolish to draw parallels between South Korean medical care and American health care, so I won’t bother. Suffice it to say that Life has a point of view, but it doesn’t let that bias change a good story.

The protagonist Ye Jin-woo, played by Lee Dong-wook, is kind of an unknowable figure, even after close to sixteen hours of watching him. I’m not sure if it’s a function of the performance or the writing, but you never really understand why he does things; his motivations are unclear. Not terribly likable, he simply plays a role and that’s that. His handicapped brother Sun-woo is a more accessible character who comes right up to the edge of becoming tragic without quite getting there. What really shines is the relationship between the two, which is multilayered and complex.

Ye Jin-woo’s opposite number is the hard-charging businessman Gu Seung-hyo, who’s not quite a villain and not quite a decent fellow, but you get to know him and even like him a little, despite yourself. He’s played by Cho Seung-woo, who had also portrayed the emotionally distant protagonist in the legal drama The Stranger. Here he shows a little more range; he’d almost have to. Yoo Jae-myung, who was also in The Stranger, does a turn in Life as a surgeon with a somewhat troubled past, and invests depth and pathos into the character that’s desperately needed.

More a slice-of-life story than a tightly-plotted narrative like other K-dramas, Life provides a window into South Korean health care, journalism, and big business that’s interesting, but not compelling.

Free Media, Conservative Media, and Quality (or Lack of It)

Social media didn’t start with Facebook; the network of blogs that rose to prominence after 9/11/2001 predates it. For many of us, the September 11 terror attacks became a red pill moment when we realized that what we’d been told about the world and our place in it was less accurate than anyone let on. (Prior to the rise of the blogosphere, Livejournal was the blogging platform of choice, typically the province of angst-ridden teenage diarists.) Once political blogging took off, particularly during the run up to Gulf War 2, everyone with an opinion and an internet connection had access to a soapbox in the public square. Free to publish, free to read, blogging helped build the idea that everything online should be free.

That few blogs were worth the cost of subscription rarely factored into their popularity.

With social media came social forces, and cliques were formed. The early bloggers, possessing a relative monopoly on readers hungry for free content, linked most frequently to their friends. Qualitative considerations were not a factor. Like in everything, it wasn’t what you knew, but who you knew. The most popular bloggers weren’t necessarily the best writers or thinkers: they simply succeeded in networking. You’ve no doubt followed a link from a popular blogger who claimed that the piece linked to was amazingly insightful, only to be disappointed. If you’ve been around for a few years, you’ve no doubt followed hundreds of such links. That’s the power of networking.

This turned out to be a gigantic boon for conservative media, which until then was comprised of two things: Rush Limbaugh and Fox News. Now the right had the blogosphere, where thousands of under-served conservatives and libertarians could read opinion pieces that bolstered their outlook instead of having to swallow progressive boilerplate disguised as conservative opinion by writers like David Brooks of The New York Times.

And they could do it for free. No paywalls, no monthly costs.

Then social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter popped up, and with this new form of communication, many blogs shut down. Why go through the rigmarole of logging into your blog and writing a post about what made you angry when you could do it on Facebook, with the benefit of a captive audience of your friends, family, and former high school classmates? Facebook’s free, too. You get the same dopamine hits from Likes and Shares and comments as you did with your blog, but with less hassle.

This made many blogs go under. Some got bought by millionaires and became part of Conservative, Inc.: the network of opinion sites that operate much like blogs, but aren’t blogs, because they’re a little more professionally coded. These opinion sites were, for the most part, run just like the blogs of yore, because the people in charge of them had little to no experience running anything but blogs. Like blogs, Conservative, Inc. sites are free to read, and the majority of writers on them do not get paid. (Some sites do pay writers per click, which encourages clickbait and shallow screeds.) The quality is inconsistent. Some columnists have been grinding out the same piece week after week for years, but still have fans. Others are there simply because they’re networked from the early days and got grandfathered in. There are a few sites that are consistently quality, in both content and writing, but they’re the exception, not the rule.

(I described why Conservative, Inc. is the way it is, ideologically speaking, here. Take a look at it. They have a business model they have to stick to, and most of them aren’t conservatives, but libertarians.)

The problem with making everything free is that your readers aren’t customers, and hence don’t value your content. They haven’t purchased it. They’re not invested. They only value you, and only if you’ve turned them into fans. A fan will read whatever you write, and pay for the privilege. A fan will become an evangelist for you. Turning a free reader into a fan is a difficult process. It’s not an “If A, then B; if B, then C” proposition. Once you make enough fans, you’ll get more fans. But to succeed in content creation, you need to make fans. Quality doesn’t matter. Your network matters. Once you’ve got enough fans, they’ll stick with you no matter how mediocre your product may be. They’ll make excuses for you.

It’s impossible to overstate the difficulty of transforming free readers into customers. Many online columnists turn their skills to writing books, and find, to their disappointment, that their internet popularity doesn’t translate into dollars. They have readers, but not fans. Not customers. This is because the internet has trained the public to expect everything for free. Why should I buy your book when I can just read your columns and Tweets gratis? I Shared your latest piece on my Facebook wall: I’ve done my part to support you. I’ve given you exposure. Now you want me to pry open my wallet, blow out the dust, and give you my hard-earned cash for something I might not even like? Are you crazy? You’ve got thousands of Twitter followers and write for a big site anyway; aren’t they paying you the big bucks?

So it’s difficult, but not impossible. Some people have made it, and you probably know their names. Certain creators had fan bases before the Politicization of Everything, so delving into political commentary made perfect sense as another revenue stream, or as a source of income once their political leanings alienated them from their industry of choice.

People get funny when it comes to money; ask George Thorogood. It explains why almost none of the big names in conservative media take risks, particularly to help other conservative content creators. Money trumps ideology. Money trumps culture. If you’re outside the network, you don’t exist. The thinking is if you’re any good, you’ll earn those fans, and when you’ve made it up here with us big boys, then we’ll notice you. That so many of them are there because of networking instead of quality isn’t something they consider, and for good reason. Who wants to think of himself as a recipient of internet nepotism? The Peter Principle applies everywhere, not just in government and large corporations. Longevity helps. Most of success is showing up. Parlay your one semi-viral success into a regular gig and keep your head down. Let it ride.

This ossification isn’t limited to conservative media: the conservative audience also suffers from the same condition. What’s easier, endlessly whining about the rot in our media culture, or doing something about it? If you can’t be bothered to shell out five bucks for a book that doesn’t spread its cheeks and spray woke agitprop all over your bad-attitude face, what will you do to change your culture? If you don’t support the content you want to see, it will go away. What will it take to move you? You’ll keep paying Hollywood degenerates and SJW book publishers to produce content specifically crafted to advance a social agenda that’s destructive to your ethics, but you won’t invest in alternative media? Maybe it’s true what they say: if it ain’t Space Marines, post-apocalyptic Dystopias, or Heinlein, the right’s not interested. (I know: most conservative fiction is awful. Don’t buy books that are awful. Don’t go see movies that are awful. But maybe step out of a comfort zone created by woke progressive gatekeepers every once in a while. You might find something you like!)

Outside of being funded by a libertarian rich guy, there’s very little money in conservative media, and trying to get your slice of that tiny pie is a bad investment in time, money, and energy. Everything, including the conservative media industry itself, is against you. You either have to do it for love of content creation or the pure desire to change the culture, knowing that you’re alone. Attempting to appeal to the right by creating cultural content amounts to indulging in an expensive hobby. Do you really want to hustle for hours every week just to get an occasional review, sale, or mention on a mid-to-low-level opinion blog? Is that a good use of your time?

Your best bet is to create content that appeals to everyone. It’s a lot like winning the lottery, but at least you don’t have to pretend to like a bunch of substandard writing by self-important mediocrities along the way.

News 10-30-2019

I’ve had a love-hate relationship with Twitter for some time, in the same way a drug addict has a love-hate relationship with heroin.

In August of 2014, I wrote about my somewhat naive observations of Twitter a couple weeks after joining the platform.

In June of 2017, I described how Twitter is the worst thing ever devised, calling it “the mirror of my worst self.”

In November of 2018, I advised readers not to quit Twitter.

Today, I quit Twitter. Actually, I did it last week. More specifically, I stopped reading Twitter except for DMs. Twitter is a time-sink, it doesn’t sell books, and it’s horribly poisonous. I contributed in small part to this toxicity, but no longer. When you find yourself arguing with teenage wannabe transsexuals about anything, let alone the disturbing confluence of gender and politics, you’re in the wrong place, doing the wrong thing. I’ll still have my site post to Twitter, but that’s the extent of it. I very much enjoyed kibitzing about non-book/non-political issues with friends, and I’ll miss that. But I don’t miss the rest of it.

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The print version of Appalling Stories 3: Escape from Trumplandia is ready for purchase in the Amazon store. If you have even the smallest hint of a sense of humor, you will laugh at least a few times reading this short novel, written by Ray Zacek and yours truly. There’s sci-fi action, Native American culture, searing political satire, and almost fifty rude names for the President of the United States. Love Trump or hate him, you will dig Escape from Trumplandia. And if you don’t, Amazon offers a money-back guarantee! I think.

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Appalling Stories 4: Even More Appalling Tales of Social Injustice is on track for a December 2019 release. I’m really excited about this one. Here’s the back cover copy:

Buy this book before they ban it!

With Woke Progressivism corroding every American cultural institution, there’s only one place to find the best of the new literary counterculture, and that’s here: the Appalling Stories series.

In Appalling Stories 4, we skewer the left’s sacred cows and make burgers from the carcasses. You’ll find tales of hilarious Hollywood degeneracy, disturbing dystopias, Green New Deals gone black, old-school treasure-hunting, and much more. Triggering, microaggressions, macroaggressions, punching down, punching up, punching Antifa: like the old spaghetti sauce commercial says, it’s in there.

And it’s all fun to read. We’re not preachers or pundits: we’re entertainers, and we keep you on the edge of your seat, glued to every page.

Just don’t ask us to unstick you.

Closer to the publication date I’ll give you a sneak peek at the Table of Contents and let you know who wrote the kick-ass foreword.

Book Review Resurrection: Sweet Tooth

Some time ago I wrote a review of R.M. Huffman’s Sweet Tooth series for the now-defunct horror website The Slaughtered Bird. As Halloween is coming up, and the stories are too good to miss for this time of year, I am republishing this review here.

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R.M. Huffman deftly straddles the line of horror and humor in his Sweet Tooth series of short stories about Dr. Pierce, a vampire psychiatrist who faces challenges both medical and supernatural in his practice. Huffman is himself a practicing physician, and his knowledge of the human body’s foibles adds credibility to Pierce’s internal dialogue and actions. While clever and lighthearted, the Sweet Tooth stories tackle heavier issues at times, with varying results.

The title story, Sweet Tooth, introduces us to Pierce in a very droll fashion: he’s crept into a local hospital on Halloween night to feed on the glucose-laden blood of diabetic patients. It’s how he gets his sugar rush, you see. Pierce is himself a throwback to the vampires of Stoker’s tale: he doesn’t cast a reflection, can’t stand crosses, is repulsed by garlic. No sparkling here.

The scope widens a bit with Lord of the Pies, where Pierce has to contend with a most unusual antagonist brought into his clinic for psychiatric care. Here we learn that Pierce is far from the only supernatural creature in the world, and that even vampire doctors have to work on Thanksgiving.

In A Very Christmas Sweet Tooth, Pierce shows us the vague beginnings of a conscience; or, perhaps, just a desire to see a case through to the bitter end.

The Heartstaker story brings us to Valentine’s Day, when even vampires and werewolves get lonely. Can a cold-blooded, undead immortal like Pierce fall in love?

With Easter comes the story Raise the Dad, which finds Pierce hiding in his crypt: “Imagine how you might feel about Halloween if the decorations and costumes were real. Crosses. So many crosses.” Even in seclusion there’s no rest for the wicked, and Pierce has an unwelcome visitor that unearths not just the unquiet dead, but unresolved personal issues as well.

The anthology ends with Rebirthday Boy, where we find Pierce celebrating both Independence Day and his (fake) birthday: you have to maintain a façade of mortality when you deal with humans, after all. This neatly wraps up the various story threads from the previous Sweet Tooth tales and sets up for a new chapter in Pierce’s (un)life.

In Sweet Tooth Omnibus, we get a year in the life of a vampire who’s anything but an ordinary bloodsucker. Amoral, anti-heroic, and yet a physician who helps both the living and undead. A fun anthology told in a unique voice: definitely worth a midnight read.

K-Drama Review: Possessed

Most of the time I can’t stand urban fantasy: werewolves, vampires, zombies, half-demon/half-angel hybrids, and other such figures crammed into a big city somewhere, interacting (having sex) with ordinary humans who happen to be half-angels themselves or whatever. It’s a crowded genre, both in its conventions and its representation in fiction.

But the South Koreans do it right. At least on television. While I mostly enjoyed the urban fantasy drama Black (except for the end), I really enjoyed Possessed, which has a terrific take on faith, love, death, and the supernatural.

At its heart, Possessed is a show about transformation: not only do the characters undergo significant changes, but the world itself transforms, and with it the show’s tone. Halfway through the sixteen-episode run, the story gets much darker, and the bits of humor interspersed here and there save it from becoming a grim, dreary fable. Because of this, the show takes risks that few American dramas do: characters make reasonable, if destructive choices, and become more believable as a result.

As a primarily character-driven story, Possessed relies heavily on the performances of its principal actors: Song Sae-byeok as detective Kang Pil-sung and Go Joon-hee as psychic Hong Seo-jung. This reliance is not misplaced. Kang Pil-sung is a character with tremendous depth, and it shows in his portrayal. In a lesser actor, he would merely come off as gruff and dim, but here he shows a multilayered personality behind his awkwardness. Hong Seo-jung, as the psychic, has an amazing way of communicating either humor or sadness in a single glance; with her perfect face and wide, serious eyes, you can’t help but be drawn in.

As is often the case with these long-form, complex K-dramas, the side characters take on a life of their own, including the antagonists. They’re well-drawn and fleshed-out, and as the story progresses, endure terrifying trials. At no point does Possessed ask you to take them for granted, and they would steal the show themselves if the protagonists weren’t so riveting.

The story isn’t original, but makes the tropes seem unworn. A serial killer of women named Hwang Dae-du is caught, tried, and executed, and decades later, a psychopathic doctor makes a shaman pull Hwang Dae-du’s soul from Hell to possess him and make him a more effective murderer. Psychic Hong Seo-jung, who lives a simple life as a clothing shop employee, gets involved, meets detective Kang Pil-sung, and the two team up to stop Hwang Dae-du. Ghosts, ritual magic, and psychic journeys ensue, while Hwang Dae-du initiates a plan to turn the entire world into the Hell he escaped from.

As you can guess from the show’s title, a number of people get possessed by others, but not in a casual, body-jumping sort of way. The more powerful Hwang Dae-du gets, the more desperate the main characters become to stop him, hampered by a world that doesn’t believe in the supernatural.

Unlike Black, the end is satisfying, if sad. The writers didn’t cut corners: no one is safe, and the genre considerations take a back seat to good storytelling. That’s rare. It’s good TV. Check it out.