David Dubrow's Blog, page 46

Friday Notes

When my laptop began to suffer from mechanical emphysema on top of the other ailments an aging machine suffers, I was able to replace it while the data was still accessible in its dying brain.  Dealing with the transfer of data and a sick little boy has made it impossible to get any work done, so Friday Links are canceled this week.  Still, I have something to tell you.
The rewrite of The Nephilim and the False Prophet is complete.  This is, of course, the sequel to my novel The Blessed Man and the Witch .  There is still more work to be done to make it ready for publication, but light is visible at the end of the tunnel.  The conclusion is tightened, the antagonists' aims are more clearly shown, and several characters die.  In keeping with tradition in trilogies of this kind, this middle book is really quite dark, though not unrelievedly so.  I like to peel back the skin of the universe to show you the gears beneath, and you'll get that here.  There's betrayal, magic, angels, demons, and glimpses of the higher planes of existence.  While the first novel dealt with the return of miracles to the world and how both witting and unwitting strangers must deal with the coming apocalypse, this one digs into what happens when the end is upon us.  Some hope to stop it, some to mitigate the terrible events, some to speed it up, and some hope to avoid it entirely.  Blood and violence and magick and profanity and real people.  And Nephilim.  You haven't seen Nephilim like these before.
Have a great weekend!

Movie Review: Sinister

With the talent behind  Sinister , you would think it might be a decent horror film.  Ethan Hawke's a talented actor, and both Vincent D'Onofrio and Fred Thompson make appearances.  Writer/Director
It wasn't.

The lack of an actual antagonist that the protagonist could go up against was a major factor in what went wrong with this movie.  Was the antagonist Mr. Boogie?  The snuff films?  The ghost children?  There was no way to tell, because none of them actually did anything.  Up until the very end, the protagonist was his own enemy: moving his family to a house where murders occurred and not telling his wife about the house's history, his drinking, his hiding of the snuff films rather than contacting the police, his ego.  He was both the bad guy and not the bad guy, and the movie suffered from this muddling of a crucial, fundamental story element.


Deputy So-and-So was extremely funny, too much so.  His lines and delivery were too clever, and I found myself hoping to see more of him than anyone else.  That's not good in a horror film that isn't intended to be comedy.

Fred Thompson and Vincent D'Onofrio were great, the way they always are, but criminally underused.  It's possible that the budget only permitted short scenes with them, which is a terrible shame.  Why have them at all if you're not going to let them steal the show?

The kid with the night terrors added very little to story or scares.  As a red herring, he was kind of a waste of time.  Too old to feel bad for (except at the very end) and too young to affect the film's outcome, he should've been edited out.

Mrs. Protagonist told the protagonist that she didn't want things to "go sour" this time like they did when he was working on a previous book, but we don't know what the protagonist did back then to make the conflict meaningful.  Did he go on all-night drinking binges?  Hit the kids?  Throw sauerkraut around the house?  Who knows?  We know he isn't hallucinating due to alcohol consumption because we were seeing the ghosts, too.

The method of Mr. Boogie's murders was pretty disturbing, but without some really graphic, horrific violence on screen, they wound up as tame events projected onto a bed sheet.

Your time is better spent watching something else for 110 minutes.  Two stars out of five.

Adam Howe's Gator Bait

Adam Howe, author of Black Cat Mojo , has just released a novella titled Gator Bait .

I was honored to write a blurb for the book, and Ginger Nuts of Horror has published an extract from it available nowhere else online.

"Adam Howe’s Gator Bait is a steamy, disquieting piece of bayou noir that you can’t help but eat all in one sitting.  It won’t settle your stomach, but it will stay with you long after you’ve digested it."


Click the link, read the blurb and extract, and buy the novella.  At $0.99, it's a steal!

Friday Links: Pixels, Ancient Giants, and The Invaders

It's been a long, draggy sort of week, but you made it to Friday!  Let's celebrate by looking back on what happened over the last several days:
Martin Lastrapes did a podcast with one of my favorite people in horror, the inimitable Jasper Bark.At the always-readable R'lyeh Tribune, Sean Eaton analyzed my favorite Lovecraft story, The Shadow Out of Time: "Its broad panorama of Earth’s existence in time and space, combined with its well-wrought depiction of the Great Old Ones and their interaction with human destiny form the basis for all kinds of interesting narrative possibilities.  Had the author survived the late 1930s, The Shadow Out of Time would have made an excellent starting place from which Lovecraft might have launched additional novel-length projects." The Film Connoisseur  reviewed Pixels: "What this movie is though is a nostalgia bomb. If you were born in the 80’s and played video games in arcades the way I did, you will feel a shot of nostalgia in your system. I have to admit it was cool seeing a giant Pac-Man eating up taxi cabs and city streets, especially since I’m such a Pac-Man nut! It was awesome seeing a giant King Kong throwing barrels at Adam Sandler, and then there’s this scene where they simply throw as many old video game characters on the screen as they can, so you’ll see Frogger, Q-bert, Paperboy, Centipede, Galaga, Space Invaders…and that’s without counting all the other characters from 80’s pop culture that show up in the film like Max Headroom, Ronald Reagan, Madonna and Hall & Oates." In Detroit, a statue depicting Baphomet, the Prince of Darkness, was unveiled: "Ultimately, the Satanic Temple hopes to have the statue placed permanently next to a sculpture of the Ten Commandments monument now in place near a state courthouse in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, or outside Arkansas’ Statehouse in Little Rock, where a Ten Commandments monument also is planned."Nev Murray reviewed Adam Cesare's novel Mercy House at his Confessions of a Reviewer!! : "Our main characters in this book stand out big and tall for varying reasons. Harriett is nuts. There is no doubt about that. Her son Don and his wife Nikki are doing the best they can for her. She doesn’t see it like that. When the “thing” happens her level of nuttiness multiplies by a million. She goes on a horrific rampage with only one mission. Get Nikki."Zombos' Closet belched out an awesome pressbook from the 1959 film The Rebel Set.  John Kenneth Muir reached back into the 1960's to bring us that classic TV show The Invaders: "In this case, the series depicts a WASP-y figure of the establishment (David Vincent) suddenly introduced to the new America of the mid-to-late 1960s; the sub-culture or emerging counter-culture. Through his "radical" belief in an alien invasion, Vincent finds himself shunned by figures of the American ruling class (co-workers, government officials, the wealthy, and so forth) and even hunted by them (particularly the police force). These individuals now view Vincent with disdain because he has forsaken his safe "role" in white, middle-class American society for that of a prophet...a doomsayer warning of planetary emergency."Jim Mcleod himself reviewed the horror movie Scream Machine at his Ginger Nuts of Horror: "Scream Machine could be viewed in one of two ways, it could be looked at as a loving homage to the works of Troma, or it can be viewed as a pile of steaming shit.  I would imagine that some of it will come down to just how much you like Troma  films. However,  I don't think that the filmmakers' mothers, after drinking a potion of kindness, could view this film as anything other than a pile of steaming shit."  Read the whole thing to get the full effect.Ghost Hunting Theories may have found proof of ancient giants in the Grand Canyon: "We also have a legend of ancient giants being found in a cave in the Grand Canyon, hiding from a catastrophe with an inventory of all their seeds and animals and treasures by a man named Kinkaid in the early 1900s."Here, I talked about the new masculinity and pointed you to a review I wrote of Alan Rodgers's novel Fire.Illustration by Tom Sullivan for Call of Cthulhu's S. Petersen's Field Guide to Cthulhu Monsters .

GNoH Review: Fire

At Jim Mcleod's Ginger Nuts of Horror, I reviewed Alan Rodgers's novel Fire:

"It’s got Biblical apocalypse, nuclear bombs, and a weird, somehow benign Beast of Revelation with magical abilities."


The novel was originally published in 1990.  Does it still hold up?  Click to find out!

The New Masculinity

Much has been made of some recent stories regarding masculinity, so I will connect the dots to reveal the picture beneath.  It's not pretty.

This story about a man and his open marriage is very likely satire, but it's been treated seriously by most commentators, so I'll do the same.  The most important paragraph is this:

"She knew how deep our love was, and knew that her wanting a variety of sexual experiences as we traveled through life together would not diminish or disrupt that love. It took me about six months — many long, intense conversations, and an ocean of red wine — before I knew it, too."

This man isn't a capon because he's raising the children at home while his wife brings home the bacon; many households have embraced this traditional role-reversal.  He's a capon because he embraces his wife's serial infidelity, calls it feminism, and happily confesses this disgusting state of affairs in a public forum.  Note, however, that he knows on some level how wrong this arrangement is: the requirement of alcohol to accept it, the admission of resentment and insecurity, the rationalization that he loves himself so much that he can live with this.  Note also the boundary-pushing of his wife when she fell asleep at her lover-du-jour's residence after an assignation: she wants no part of her husband, and he refuses to accept it.  He is a man in biology only, and his wife keeps him around to watch the children.

Slate, not to be outdone, published a different piece from a different capon.  Money graf:

"I hate how much I love to grill. It’s not that I’m inclined to vegetarianism or that I otherwise object to the practice itself. But I’m uncomfortable with the pleasure I take in something so conventionally masculine. Looming over the coals, tongs in hand, I feel estranged from myself, recast in the role of suburban dad. At such moments, I get the sense that I’ve fallen into a societal trap, one that reaffirms gender roles I’ve spent years trying to undo."

Here is a person of the male gender uncomfortable with masculinity.  Guilty, even.  Simply because he cooks food outdoors.  Lewis's quote regarding "men without chests" applies here, in spades.  This is someone who spends his days in a self-conscious effort to eradicate masculinity, by his own admission (undoing gender roles).  Men like this don't storm the beaches at Normandy.  They don't pull children out of burning buildings.  And they won't help you fight a man with a knife.  Civilization is not defended by such people.

This final story's a bit more complex: a transgender reporter named Zoey Tur got angry at pundit Ben Shapiro during a news program, grabbed him by the neck, and threatened to put him in the hospital.  Later, Tur advised Shapiro that they would meet in the parking lot (presumably to fight), and subsequently suggested on social media that he would like to "curb stomp" Shapiro.

One of the traditional masculine virtues is having a comfort level with violence, a comfort level that women typically don't have.  Transsexual Tur obviously retains that comfort level, despite his transitioning therapy.  Shapiro isn't as comfortable with physical violence, as you can see in the video.  There are a few mitigating factors: the significant weight/size disparity between Tur and Shapiro, and Shapiro's reasonable concern over the legal consequences of producing violence.

Nevertheless, those of us who accept and embrace traditional masculine virtues, even those virtues society attempts to "undo," know what we would have done in Shapiro's situation: thrown Tur's arm off, possibly with a choice obscenity and warning, and made ready for fisticuffs should Tur's arm lift again.  Nobody has a right to put a hand on you.

Instead, Shapiro initiated legal proceedings, which is a perfectly acceptable way to handle such an assault.

What's fascinating is this piece that celebrates Tur's assault and, in an incredible feat of rhetorical gymnastics, calls Shapiro a bully for expressing a point of view that is shared by millions and millions of people.  To people like Robin Abcarian, Tur's a hero.  A bully-smasher.  This is the kind of man we should be celebrating: a transsexual who threatens physical violence and commits assault over a disagreement.  Masculine virtues are to be despised except when evidenced by someone attempting to eradicate his own masculinity.  Of special interest is Abcarian's ludicrous attempt to minimize Tur's assault by saying that Tur "gently put her hand on his shoulder".  That wasn't gentle, it wasn't a caress, and this deliberate mischaracterization of what actually happened tells us very clearly that Abcarian knows in the small, shriveled place in her heart that's still capable of honesty that Tur's actions were unacceptable.

You can't have it both ways.  Holding up capons like Cuckold Man and Ashamed to Grill as the new men in one hand and expressing admiration for transsexual Zoey Tur's assault in the other cancel each other out.  This ambivalence from our intellectual and moral betters in the news and entertainment media reflects the very real conflict of masculinity in today's culture: we want men to be this way and not that.  Except that if men are this way, then they're not men any longer.  If they're that way, they're bullies and, most importantly, not feminists.

And we can't have that.  Better to castrate and bid the geldings be fruitful.

Thought of the day for men: would you rather be admired as a feminist or shunned as a brute by the likes of Robin Abcarian?

Friday Links: Giant Seagulls, Flooded Cemeteries, and The Mind of Mr. Soames

It's been a busy week, so are you sure you managed to catch everything that happened in the world of the bizarre and horrific?  If not, here are some highlights:
At Ghost Hunting Theories, we were treated to a roundup of stories involving flooded cemeteries (ew).Terrorphoria returned from summer break long enough to review the movie It Follows: "A menacing tone steeped in nostalgia for classics like Halloween is established from the first scene. Director David Robert Mitchell could be accused of borrowing too heavily from early John Carpenter works, but It Follows has enough original ideas to keep it from feeling derivative. There’s a lot of retro goodness here though, including a synth score from musician Disasterpiece, who is best known for his work on indie game FEZ. One of my favorite tricks that David Robert Mitchell borrowed was the use of still wide-angle shots. It was so refreshing to see that in the current horror landscape drenched in “shaky cam” found-footage movies."Giant seagulls attacked full-grown sheep in Ireland: "[The sheep owner] has since called for a gull cull as the animals show little fear of humans and are coming further inland. It's not the only gull assault that's been reported in the area. In nearby Iveragh, Vincent Appleby was on his motorcycle when a large gull nearly knocked him off." It was all David Bernstein all the time this week at Nev Murray's Confessions of a Reviewer!!, with  a two-part interview and a review of the novel Skinner: "So – a group of kids trapped in an abandoned cabin with some sort of wild animal outside that is basically scaring the crap out of them. Yeah it’s been done before hasn’t it? Whenever I get into a book like this and discover the plot I panic. Purely and simply because if there is nothing different to this story, I will not finish it if my attention is not kept at a high level. I finished this one. In fact I couldn’t really put it down. Why? Because Mr Bernstein added his own little twist to the story that made it the same, but different."From the Depths of DVD Hell reviewed the documentary The Death of "Superman Lives": What Happened?: "A project most people know about thanks to Kevin Smith regularly regaling audiences with his contribution to the project as the original screen writer as part of his Q&A sessions whenever given the chance. More recently though this project has generated a lot of discussion because it would have seen Nicolas Cage taking on the iconic role, but until now there’s never been any real attempt to explain what happened to the project outside Smith’s tales and that costume test photo of Cage in his Superman costume."Sean Eaton opined, contra the Rolling Stones, that time was not on our side at his thoughtful R'lyeh Tribune: "Lovecraft enthusiasts can depend on his able hagiographer, S.T. Joshi, to set the record straight.  The complex relationship between Derleth and Lovecraft is deftly analyzed by Joshi in volume two of his excellent biography of Lovecraft, I Am Providence (2013).  According to Joshi, one of the reasons Farnsworth Wright rejected work by Derleth as early as 1931 was because, quoting Wright, “you have lifted whole phrases from Lovecraft’s works, as for instance: ‘the frightful Necronomicon of the mad Arab Abdul Alhazred…’”—Wright goes on to list several more examples."Zombos' Closet unearthed an awesome lobby card you have to see.At Jim Mcleod's Ginger Nuts of Horror, Kit Power reviewed Paul Feeney's novella The Last Bus: "Elsewhere, the author has described the plot as ‘B-Movie fare’ and while I understand the description, to me it read more like a feature length episode of ‘The Outer Limits’. The setting is really smart - a typical commuter bus in a busy city. It’s clever because it is a natural environment for a classic horror movie cast of strangers flug together by circumstance. It’s a canny move, and one that speaks to Feeney’s clear grasp and understanding of genre."John Kenneth Muir analyzed the 1970 film The Mind of Mr. Soames: "At England's Midland Research Institute, Dr. Maitland  (Nigel Davenport) and a brilliant surgeon, Dr. Bergen (Robert Vaughn) embark upon a unique experiment. John Soames (Terence Stamp) has been in a coma since birth, and never once opened his eyes. Now, a new surgical technique allows Bergen to awaken the thirty-five year old man for the first time. The surgery is an incredible success, and before the eyes of a curious TV camera crew, Soames enters the world of the conscious. Maitland enrolls the grown “baby” into a rigorous instructional program, attempting to teach him all the knowledge and important lessons of life in a mere six weeks."Here, I pointed you to a review I wrote of Jasper Bark's Bloodfellas and talked a little more about the July 4 DC Metro stabbing.Illustration by Rodell D. Sanford, Jr. for Triad Entertainment's Lurking Fears Call of Cthulhu supplement.

DC Metro Stabbing: Cause and Effect vs. Courage

I wrote about this story and its attendant considerations here, but in light of a recent article by R. Douglas Fields purporting to explain why so many able-bodied people abandoned their duties as members of civilization, I thought I would return to the well this one last time.

Predictably, the author sets his and everybody else's default to coward:

"It may be comforting to indulge in speculation about how you would have responded to the deadly attack on Sutherland, but the fact is that it is difficult to know how anyone will react to a sudden threat."

Pre-determining that in a dangerous situation you'll act to save another human being's life isn't an indulgence, nor is it comforting to do so.  It's an acknowledgment of our shared burden as members of society.  Just because it's difficult to know how you'll react, it doesn't mean that you can't react courageously, or that you shouldn't do it, or that you shouldn't prepare yourself to do it.

"The multiple factors and uncertainties mean that there is rarely one correct response to a sudden threat."

This is where we get caught up in minutiae to justify inaction.  Hick's Law notwithstanding, there really is one correct response to the threat that has led me to write two articles: stop the guy stabbing someone else to death.  This response can take many forms, of course, but all of them are correct if you're stopping the killer.

"Bystander apathy is a psychological phenomenon in which witnesses to a person being harmed are less likely to intervene the more people there are present. This is thought to be a consequence of the herding instinct of human beings to do as they see others do. But when many people are present it is a much more complex situation. This leads to confusion. Is the person being attacked a victim or another criminal involved in, say, a gang fight? The Metro riders who saw the assault on Sutherland experienced neither apathy nor confusion, however. They experienced terror."

Your worth as a person is measured, in part, by doing the right thing despite what you see others doing.  The number of people present in the subway car didn't create confusion or even lead to it, unless they were engaged in mass telepathy and were all thinking the same thing.  This was obviously not a gang fight.  Experiencing terror does not excuse you from acting properly.  Courage is determined by how you act despite your terror.  Ask any soldier, firefighter, or cop.

"I cannot know what those witnesses lived through on that train, but I am confident from my knowledge of neuroscience that they did exactly the right thing. Their response was not a matter of bravery or cowardice or apathy—it was a matter of mortal strategy. Engaging the homicidal robber physically could have resulted in mass casualties. From all the situational information those people rapidly assimilated, that was their collective conclusion. So the passengers tried to appease the robber with cash instead and no one else lost their life."

C.S. Lewis must have known R. Douglas Fields, because he described him perfectly in his Abolition of Man : "We make men without chests and expect from them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honor and are shocked to find traitors in our midst."  The witnesses on that train did not do exactly the right thing: Kevin Joseph Sunderland, were he able, would likely agree.  Neither a scientific explanation of cowardice nor a redefining of the term bravery excuse the shameful inaction of the passengers on that train.  Your mortal strategy needs to be flexible enough to take monsters like Jasper Spires into account.

Spires was one man with one knife.  Against numerous assailants ready, willing, and able to subdue him, he would not have prevailed, and mass casualties need not have been the result.  Appeasing monsters never works in the long term: they'll always come back to eat you.  If not now, later.

"Honed by eons of evolution in a dangerous world of survival of the fittest, the reaction these neural circuits trigger is usually correct; otherwise our species would have gone the way of dinosaurs. This is why rational Monday morning quarterbacking about the passengers’ response on the Metro is misguided. No fault should be leveled against any individuals on that train. They did as their brain and evolution equipped them to do."

Thousands and thousands and thousands of human beings have overcome what their brains and evolution equipped them to do over the course of civilization, from the Vigiles of ancient Rome to the modern United States soldier, from the blue-painted Pict to the grandfather punching out a would-be mugger.  Scientists like R. Douglas Fields would simply distill us into mere products of brain chemistry, despite the overwhelming evidence that we, as thinking people, transcend that every day.  We're not products of cause and effect.  There's more to us than evolution.

GNoH Review: Bloodfellas

At Jim Mcleod's Ginger Nuts of Horror, I reviewed the graphic novel Bloodfellas.  Jasper Bark wrote the script, Mick Trimble did the drawing, and Aljoša Tomić colored it.

If you read no other graphic novel this year (or at any other time), this is the one you have to get.  I can't recommend it highly enough.  Click on the link, check out the review, and run, don't walk, to Amazon to pick it up.

Friday Links: Michael McDowell, Stephen Volk, and Asrovak Mikosevaar

The weekend looms.  Before it falls upon us like a rotten tree, let's take a look back at what happened during the week:
Terrorphoria reviewed Stevie Kopas's third book in the Breadwinner Trilogy: "Far more action-oriented than previous installments, All Good Things is a fast read thanks to the non-stop battles raging through the Florida streets. As the group moves towards what should be their final destination, the atmosphere is downright oppressive and it never lets up."  At his extensively incisive R'lyeh Tribune, Sean Eaton introduced us to the concept of a mathematic conte-cruel: "The word conte-cruel has an interesting etymology involving Edgar Allan Poe, his pervasive influence on certain French authors of the mid nineteenth century, and the concept’s reintroduction to America—via Ambrose Bierce and his colleagues as well as Poe earlier—through the translated works of Baudelaire and Villiers, the latter having produced a collection of stories demonstrating the concept, Contes cruels (1883)."Jasper Bark introduced us to Michael McDowell in his own inimitable way at This Is Horror: "“Oh really?” I replied. “This is one of my favourite books.” I knew this even though I hadn’t read it. In fact, I knew this even though I’d never heard of the book or Calvino until I’d picked it up ten seconds before, and wouldn’t read it for another six months. I knew it the moment I came across Flann O’Brien’s The Third Policeman and that took me a decade to finally read. I know it about Malcolm Lowry’s Dark as the Grave Wherein my Friend is Laid and I haven’t read that yet, despite owning it for two decades."Ginger Nuts of Horror posted part three of its awesome interview with Stephen Volk: "I thought that you automatically have empathy with a child, so in a way it is my job to make that child vivid, plausible and multi-layered, and to avoid a “cute” kind of version of childhood, especially as young Fred is going to be depicted initially as a victim. Obviously you sympathise with a child weeping and wetting his pants in a police cell, yes, but one of the points of my story is, what is the consequence of that incident? What kind of character does that kind of (albeit well-meaning) parental abuse finally create?"Nev Murray interviewed Duncan Ralston at Confessions of a Reviewer!!: "It’s not quite hypergraphia, but if I don’t write for a while, I get the itch. I'm not sure where it came from; I used to prefer drawing, though I was never exceptional at it. I write for myself, and I’m glad to have found a small audience for my stories."Here, I wrote about the July 4 knife attack on a DC Metro train and pointed you to a review I wrote of Alessandro Manzetti's Eden Underground. This is a bit of an abbreviated Friday Links because I want to talk about something else that happened this week.  It has to do with abortion.  This will get political, obviously, and if you're offended, think about why.  As always, I'm happy to talk about these things, as long as we can remain civil.  Remember: arguments don't change minds.  Contemplation based on strength of information does.
I wrote a piece for Liberty Island that riffed on the blistering, searing hot take that Cracked wrote and then re-posted about the legalization of gay marriage.  My piece referred to the footage of Planned Parenthood's senior director of medical services talking about the sales of human body parts acquired through abortion (among many other appalling things).  My thoughts on abortion are available for reading here.  It's impossible to overstate how horrific this footage is, from its subject matter to the vain but desperate attempts by abortion-friendly media outlets to downplay it, including so-called objective news outlets like the Associated Press.  I write dark, horrific stuff every day, and if I'm not writing it, I'm thinking about writing it.  This is far worse than anything my most depraved imaginings have attempted to portray.

In Michael Moorcock's extraordinary tetralogy of fantasy novels called The History of the Runestaff , there was one antagonist who was so over the top that you almost couldn't take him seriously.  His name was Asrovak Mikosevaar, and he was the mercenary Warlord of the Vulture Legion.  He bore a banner that said, in scarlet letters, Death to Life!   A madman for battle, he was always at the front lines.  In light of recent revelations regarding Planned Parenthood's business practices, Mikosevaar no longer seems quite so far-fetched.  Developing a culture that respects innocent human life takes hard work and requires that we all make difficult choices every day.  I'm up for the challenge.  Are you?
Illustration by Alain Gassner for Stormbringer's Perils of the Young Kingdoms supplement.