David Dubrow's Blog, page 54

Friday Links: Remakes, Nazca Holes, and a Mad Moon

This Friday, we're sowing the seeds of love...of horror!
Sean Eaton at the always brilliant R'lyeh Tribune discussed the too-short writing career of Stanley G. Weinbaum: "Sadly, Weinbaum’s career only lasted about a year and a half following the publication of his first story.  He died of cancer at the age of 33, and The Mad Moon may have been one of the last of his stories to be published in his short lifetime.  In that brief period he produced a remarkable body of work, including 4 novels and 13 short stories, much of which was published posthumously."For Valentine's Day, Anything Horror talked about the Cronenberg version of the classic film The Fly: "Upon its release, THE FLY was rightfully critically acclaimed, as was Goldblum’s performance. Despite being a gory remake of a classic made by a controversial, non-mainstream director, the film was a huge commercial success, the biggest of Cronenberg’s career, and was the top-grossing film in the United States for two weeks, earning a total domestic gross of over forty million dollars. Audiences reacted strongly to the graphic creature effects and the tragic love story, and the film received much attention at the time of its release."Jeff at Terrorphoria gave us the fourth installment of his Writing Horror series: "This time, I'm just going to be writing about vampires taking over a coffee shop.  It isn't a plot that will turn heads, but it does seem nice, simple, and easy to finish.  I've always said and still believe that great storytellers can make gems out of the most basic ideas.  Also, I obviously know the setting well which means minimum research while still providing something unique." HorrO's Gory Reviews did what it does best: reviewed a movie.  This one was a 2014 version of White Zombie: "Now the most important part...the story. It starts off trying to get to audience on the couple's side, as they prepare to get married. As the couple prepares, Beaumonde and Devereaux reveal their own plans for Madeline. What makes this story a little different is that there's one bad guy trying to out do another bad guy."At Ginger Nuts of Horror, Paul M. Feeney reviewed John Carpenter's CD Lost Themes: "Without the necessity of having to score each track according to a specific scene, Carpenter is able to develop the music into a cohesive unit, whilst also maintaining a uniformity to the album which never descends into repetitiveness. In fact, I'd go so far as to say this is Carpenter's most mature, accomplished work and the least self-conscious (as much as I love the film, some of Big Trouble In Little China's music cues make me cringe with their slightly embarrassing rock-stylings). Sure, there are snippets of licks and riffs that put one in mind of this films or that, but the tunes are whole constructs in their own right and are very good ones too."At Ghost Hunting Theories, we learned that there's more to Nazca than just lines: "In the same plateau where the Nazca lines are found, there have been discovered holes dug into the rock. There are thousands of these stretching out. To dig so many of these holes that take up a band of land of one mile, it would have taken an enormous work force to dig these holes that are 3 feet wide and 3 to 6 feet deep! There are approximately 6900 of them!"Here, I reviewed Snowpiercer and explained why Brian Williams lied about his experiences in Iraq.  Work continues on the first draft of the sequel to The Blessed Man and the Witch .

Why Brian Williams Did What He Did

Everybody lies.  Yes, you lie, too.  We lie about what we're doing, feeling, not doing, and not feeling.  We lie to others and we lie to ourselves.  That's perfectly okay.  As thinking, reasoning adults, we can gauge the relative social importance of one lie to another.  When you don't want to tell a co-worker that you've got a massive headache, you answer, "Fine," to his, "How you doin'?" in the hall.  However, when your wife asks you how your day went and you give her the same "Fine," even though you were just fired for writing company checks to pay for your mistress's Invisalign treatments, that's extremely bad.  We all know this, but I had to set the table so we could eat.

NBC journalist Brian Williams lied.  A lot.  About a number of things.  It's clear that the deeper one digs, the more lies will be uncovered, but it's equally clear that the full extent of his untruths will never be revealed.  Even though we all lie, his lies are especially egregious because as a journalist, he has the duty to tell the truth about what's happening where.  So it's only right and proper that we question how often he has lied and about what.  Whether these questions are rooted in schadenfreude over a partisan journalist's deserved comeuppance or a true desire to get to the truth is immaterial: journalists are offered specific protections under the U.S. Constitution, and have a duty to earn those protections.  Just as your free speech rights don't include falsely yelling "Fire!" in a crowded Kanye concert, freedom of the press should not be extended to individuals who intend to report falsehoods under the guise of real news.  
Being around military personnel, especially ones who have seen combat, can be an emasculating thing for certain men who haven't served and haven't seen the elephant, like Williams.  How can your petty day-to-day experiences reading copy off a teleprompter compare to putting your eyes to the sight of a gun and pulling the trigger on another human being?
They can't.
It's even worse if you're a famous journalist and you have to be around virtual teenagers who are part of that brotherhood.  A brotherhood you will never join.  You haven't paid your dues.  You haven't been so tested.  How small, how weak you must seem to them.
During my time in video production, I met a great number of people who claimed more combat experience than they had actually acquired.  Some of them I worked with very closely.  They inflated their resumes to give themselves credibility they hadn't earned.  They omitted important facts about themselves.  They presented themselves as people they patently were not.  Not all of them, of course.  Many were and are the real deal, with skills honed through experience, not classroom study or practice with cooperative assistants.  
When wading through that kind of BS, it's very easy to let some get stuck to you.  People tell war stories all the time, and there's typically an element of competition about it.  Think Richard Dreyfuss and Robert Shaw comparing scars in Jaws .  Or, if you're so inclined, call it dick-measuring.  
I don't have those experiences.  My previous work had some element of danger to it, insofar as it included firearms and work with some real sociopaths, but it didn't compare to what the average American soldier serving in the conflict-ridden Middle East experiences every day.  And I'm perfectly fine with that.  I do what I do and I respect and support what they do. My resume is what it is, and my body of work speaks for itself.  So I can't measure my combat dick against some kid's half my age who served in Afghanistan.  I won't bother trying.

Part of being comfortable in your own skin is establishing comfort with your own experiences, no matter how prosaic.  Save the resume enhancement for a job interview.  

Movie Review: Snowpiercer

The premise behind Snowpiercer is absurd: the world has ended in snow and ice, and the only survivors of humanity live aboard a massive train that somehow never stops moving.  The poor people, the dregs live at the back of the train, while the beautiful rich people live at the front.  It's ludicrous.  It's obvious social commentary class warfare BS tarted up in global warming-based science fiction silliness.

And yet...
And yet it works.  It works incredibly well.

The script rises above the subject matter, making it a smarter story that its underlying assumptions deserve.  Hints about terrible past events begin to make sense later on in the film, from strange hand gestures to the disturbing number of amputees among the tail section passengers.  The dialogue is tight, funny when it has to be and just philosophical enough to project ideas without bludgeoning the viewer.  Familiar tropes are used, but not overused, from the wisecracking sidekick to the sassy black woman to the assassin who just won't die.

Chris Evans does a good job with what he's been given.  As a bearded, reluctant leader of a violent revolution, he made a far better Curtis than he does Captain America.  Tilda Swinton was a scream, and Kang-ho Song as the security expert added depth and humor to a supporting role.  The only low spot was Ed Harris, who slept through his performance.

At times, the film made clever use of its absurdity, with a surreal scene in a sushi bar and an even more bizarre scene in a classroom full of young worshipers of Wilford, the inventor/engineer of the train.  Just as you're lulled into accepting the movie's strangeness, it manages to hit you with something out of left field that keeps you watching.

The visual style is arresting.  Fans of Chan-wook Park ( The Vengeance Trilogy ) and Kim Jee-woon ( I Saw the Devil ) will really appreciate Joon-ho Bong's work here.  It just grabs you and you can't help but watch the whole thing.

4 out of 5 stars.

Friday Links: Carrie, Petroglyphs, and Ding-Dong Slicing

Here're some horrific and/or bizarre bits you might have missed this week:
Anything Horror reviewed the movie  The Apostate: Call of the Revenant : "As the film opens we see Cooper waking up in the above mentioned parking garage covered in what is apparently his own blood. He’s confused, he’s disoriented, and he has absolutely no idea where he is, how he got there, who put him there, and how he’s going to get out. I really enjoyed the long, lingering shots of Cooper as we watch him trying to figure out what is going on. Cinematographers Dodd and Catherine Kerr-Phillips use the camera to really give the viewer a sense of Cooper’s disorientation. We get both wide shots of Cooper as well as some very tight, claustrophobic ones as he tries to figure out and comprehend his situation. The viewer is just as much in the dark about Cooper’s situation as he is. We then suddenly shift to a well-lit, sterile looking interrogation room as Andrews is questioning Cooper. At first Andrews is nice and accommodating. She’s acting as though she wants to be Cooper’s partner in discovering what happened that night in the parking garage."At Sean Eaton's obscenely incisive R'lyeh Tribune, he discussed the use of dreams and nightmares as a writer's source material: "Out of curiosity, I informally surveyed a number of aspiring authors recently about their uses of dream material.  Not all of them were horror, science fiction or fantasy writers.  I asked them whether they felt that using dreams as source material for their work was still a useful practice, and whether there were any special challenges to creating fiction using dreams.  Thirteen people responded, some more than once to contribute additional information."Fascination with Fear did a story on bizarre gravesites: "What if cemeteries were forests, and each tree represented a deceased person? Nature-lovers are sure to love Bios Urn, a form of burial that results in reincarnation. Bios Urn works like this: the urn, which is completely biodegradable, is separated into two compartments. The top compartment contains soil into which seeds may be planted. The bottom compartment holds the ashes, and after the roots become stronger and the urn biodegrades then the two compartments will become part of the subsoil together. The website (https://urnabios.com/) sells six different kinds of seeds (Beech, Ash, Oak, Maple, Gingko, and Pine) but the urn is compatible with any seed. What kind of tree do you want to be when you die?"Joe Young at Ginger Nuts of Horror compared two versions of the movie Carrie: "To be perfectly honest I was wondering how anyone could possibly do better than Sissy Spacek, but that turned out fine. Piper Laurie, the original 'Margaret White', the deranged religious nutcase mother of Carrie was a fine performance. The same cannot be said for Julianne Moore's version of the role, which I thought was given far more screen time than deserved or required. Although not a poor performance I found it dragged out beyond necessity." A man in Kwara State sliced off his own penis, which is at least a bit better than slicing off somebody else's: "Speaking in on his experience while still in the hospital, Sa'adu said that he was acting on the instructions of witches who appeared to him in his dreams, telling him to cut off his penis since he was impotent."Patrick Tillett went to Antelope Hill and took awesome photos of petroglyphs: "Antelope Hill is located in Southwest Arizona, next to the Gila river and has been visited and used for thousands of years. It is said that no particular tribe of Indians ever claimed ownership of the place, but many used the resources found there. This hill is composed of a particular type of sandstone, that is well suited to create grinding stones and other stone tools. It is not found elsewhere in the area. Some of those who used this hill left their markings. Many of the petroglyphs in the photos below are thousands of years old, while others are several hundred. In a general sense, the lighter a petroglyph is (when compared to the darker desert varnish on the rest of a rock), the newer it is."Here, I wrote about the Gray Men of Horror (you might be one) and reviewed several books, some of which were really good.

Five Book Reviews for the Price of One

These are going to be short reviews, but they're all you'll need to determine if the books described are worth your time and money.

Brilliance by Marcus Sakey: Unfortunately, this book does not at all live up to the title.  Bestselling author Lee Child described it as, "The kind of story you've never read before."  That's not true.  This kind of story has been done before, and a lot better ( Wild Cards , for example).  The premise is that in 1980, a percentage of the population was born with uncanny abilities that go right up to the edge of supernatural, but don't quite reach it (they're called "abnorms").  No psychokinesis or telepathy, but one guy manipulated the stock market to make himself a multi-multi-billionaire and ended up crashing it.  Some are just super-intelligent.  The main character, Nick Cooper, has the ability to read body language in such a way as to make him an unbeatable hand-to-hand fighter.  Some abnorms have become terrorists, so Nick, under the employ of the government, goes to stop them.  It's an impossible mission.  There are many nonsensical plot twists; a standard Hollywood divorced-but-we're-still-great-friends relationship; a new love interest who happens to be incredibly beautiful; a my-child-is-in-danger plot element; and a 9/11-style attack that was actually carried out by the U.S. government, Truther-style.  Sakey breaks up the action sequences by telling us how Cooper makes his unnaturally-quick combat decisions, which slows the pace down and destroys the scene's excitement.  I really wanted to like this book, but couldn't.  Two stars out of five.Fluency by Jennifer Foehner Wells: This is a first-contact science fiction novel about a group of present-day astronauts plus one incredibly-talented linguist who go to a derelict spacecraft to explore it.  The protagonist, Jane Holloway, is the linguist.  She also alternates between weepy-weak and stronger than combat-hardened military veterans.  Plagued by a past tragedy that doesn't seem so bad, she needed a great deal of persuading from a borderline mentally defective engineer to join the space mission (as if the opportunity to meet extraterrestrial life wasn't much of a draw).  The engineer happened to be the love interest.  Her fellow astronauts act like angry high schoolers with firearms (in one laughable scene, the captain tells the crew to put armor-piercing rounds into their handguns), the love interest is extremely incompetent at just about everything, and her supernatural ability to pick up languages faster than others can program a VCR enables her to communicate telepathically with the one surviving intelligent alien aboard the ship.  None of these characters were likable or acted in ways that made sense, the plot was a mishmash of alien politics and crew infighting, and the story seemed too much like a setup for future volumes rather than its own discrete narrative.  Two stars out of five. The Wayward Pines trilogy by Blake Crouch: A sci-fi thriller that consists of Pines , Wayward , and The Last Town .  There were times when I was reading these books that I literally couldn't put them down for love or money.  They were awesome.  Extremely well-written, accurate with weapons, complex in characterization, and exciting from start to finish.  The big secret to the town of Wayward Pines, revealed in Pines, was a bit disappointing and unbelievable, but overcame that anyway.  Wayward didn't suffer from the middle-book slump that so many trilogies experience, and brought real tension to the overall story.  The Last Town had a disappointing ending, but it wasn't a failure of writing.  I simply strongly disagreed with the choices the characters made at the end, though the epilogue gave it a final punch.  If you read nothing else in the thriller genre this year, at least pick up Wayward Pines.  Four out of five stars.

Gray Men of Horror

As I buckled my preschooler into his car seat, we had a brief conversation:

Him: When Uncle J--- comes back, I want him to sit next to me in the back.
Me: Well, sure, but that's not going to be for some time.  He lives really far away, you know.
Him: Is Uncle J--- yours father?
Me: No, kiddo.  My father is dead.  Uncle J--- is my brother.

At this point, his eyes filled with tears.  He's familiar with the concept of death as a practical, if not philosophical matter: we had two cats, and one of them died of heart disease some months ago, so he knows that death is a permanent state.  I didn't feel good about telling him about my father's death, but it's something we've discussed before.  It often takes several conversations for certain concepts to sink in.  The tears he shed over his grandfather suggest that he got it this time.  This time, it made sense.

Him: Yours father died?
Me: Yes, kiddo.  He was very, very sick, and he died a few years ago, when you were a baby.
Him: *crying now*: Did I sit on his lap?
Me: Yes you did.  I have a picture of it.  He really liked you, kiddo.  It's okay to be sad about it.

I hugged him in the car seat, wiped off his face, and he was fine by the time I fastened my own seat belt.  His resilience is an enviable thing.

Death is an aspect of human experience like any other, but too much emphasis on it is unhealthy, like an obsession with certain bodily functions.  So my little boy knows about it.  As someone who reads, watches, and writes horror, I consider it in ways that few people do as a matter of course.  After all, death is one of horror's most central themes.

I write about death and unspeakable horrors, but you wouldn't know it to look at me.  When I worked in the publishing industry, learning about self-defense, combat shooting, knife fighting, and similar subjects, one topic that came up from the more competent instructors was something called the Gray Man concept.  The best way to win a fight is to not be there when it happens: to be aware and avoidant.  A Gray Man doesn't wear BDUs and an NRA Life Member T-shirt to go to the 7-11.  He carries, but he blends in.  He trains in personal defense techniques but avoids fights.  He's unremarkable.  You just look past him.  That's the Gray Man.

Many horror fans aren't Gray Men (or Gray Women).  You know it to look at them.  Goths and metalheads, two subcultures that typically embrace the horror genre, select their appearances so that you know what they're into.  I attach no judgment to this: people like what they like and do what they do and that's just fine.  It's reasonable to make assumptions about a Goth's interest based on his appearance, as much as we're told to ignore judgment based upon experience and refuse to judge a book by its cover.

What of the Gray Man of horror, then?  How much horror can one consume without it coming out in the pores?  In large part, I suspect horror fans all come to the party for different reasons.  Some of us enjoy the vicarious thrill of terrible danger.  Others groove on how justice is so often meted out to the deserving in most horror stories (or, conversely, how the bad guy sometimes wins).  And yet others really like death.

What do I like about horror?  I'm a Gray Man.  You'll never know until I tell you.

Friday Links: Bark, Dick, and Torment

Let's take a long look back at what happened last week, shall we?
At the compulsively readable R'lyeh Tribune, Sean Eaton talked about Hugh B. Cave's story The Murder Machine: "Near the climax of the story, [Michael Strange] explains the nature of his evil device to the beleaguered Dr. Dale by asking some rhetorical questions:  'You have heard of hypnotism, Dale? You have heard also of radio? Have you ever thought of combining the two?'  Dr. Strange certainly has, and the result may allow him to rule the world, beginning with London."The Horror Review Hole reviewed the film Torment: "Isabelle and Dunne play a recently married couple, heading off to his holiday home in the country for a little family time. Things are complicated by two things: his son (from a previous marriage, with a dead wife) being a twat to his new mother, and a home invasion visited upon them by a cult of mask wearing loonies set on stealing said twat away from his family. The first is easily worked around (via a great conversation in which daddy tells his son that, if you're lucky, mummies die, and sometimes you get two). The second: not so much."Christina Bergling discussed psychological horror at Terrorphoria, a great place to talk about such things: "The worst hells are created in our minds. As someone with a bit of experience in being my own worst enemy, I can attest that there is nothing quite as unrelenting and pervasive as ourselves. There is no escape from our own minds, and no one knows what will torture us more than us. I think the scariest situations are when we lose reality and turn on ourselves. There is not stopping the momentum of a mind unraveling; there is no way to find a foothold against the descent of a mind."John Kenneth Muir reviewed an Amazon pilot for a television adaption of Philip K. Dick's The Man in the High Castle: "The filmmakers have worked with great skill and artistry to adapt the Hugo Award-winning 1962 novel by Philip K. Dick to a visual format. Dick’s story has been termed an “alternate history” science fiction story, meaning it ponders what might happen had history gone differently.  In this case, the Axis Power won World War II, and have since carved up America. Imperial Japan now controls the West Coast, and Nazi Germany controls the East Coast, with a “neutral zone” in the mid-west separating fiefdoms."At Ginger Nuts of Horror, Jim interviewed horror author Jasper Bark: "As I've been selling fiction professionally for a couple of decades, first scripts for radio and the stage, then scripts for comics, then fiction, I have to confess that four years seems like quite a short period for me. Both Joe, the editor, and I were quite definite that the stories all had to be in a similar vein, so my main concern was finding recent stories that would fit the tone and character of the collection as a whole. I think 2009/2010 marks the point at which my work, in horror at least, moved into its current trajectory, so I chose stories, written after this point, that reflected this new trajectory, and discarded those that didn't."Here, I reviewed two movies: Jodorowsky's Dune and Interstellar .  Most of the week I worked on a short story, a Lovecraftian effort set in 16th century Mexico.

Movie Review: Interstellar

I don't know if I'm a Christopher Nolan fan.  I really liked The Prestige and loved Inception .  His Batman trilogy was the best effort made yet to capture Batman on film, but I was never really into Batman, and the Eastern martial arts stuff seemed sort of lame.  Still, I had high hopes going into Interstellar .

It's his best yet.  Terrible movies come out all the time and people like them.  Mediocre ones get lots of Oscar attention, even when few people outside of the Academy have seen them.  Interstellar reminds us that truly great films can and do get made.  You can click on the IMDB link to get a description of the plot and learn who the cast is, but really, if you have the time, just see it.  I'll describe some of the more general aspects of the film, and then afterward discuss plot elements that give the story away.Matthew McConaughey: He did extraordinary work in this film.  Across the board the acting was *SPOILERY BITS*READ NO FURTHER IF YOU HAVEN'T SEEN INTERSTELLARMatt Damon: Unfortunately for him, Matt Damon's become such a star that he's no longer a believable character any more, no matter who he plays (unless it's Jason Bourne).  He did a good job, but he's a little miscast, because he took me out of the film a little.  I knew he was squirrelly from the beginning: he talked way too much.  Also, anyone who tells you to NOT check or double-check something is a bad guy.  He had some of the best lines in the film, with his alternately pathetic apologizing and disturbing questions of the man he was trying to murder.Bootstrapping: There's a massive plot hole that the whole film is based on, and I can't seem to get my head around it.  Everything that happens, from the wormhole appearing to Cooper saving himself via the tesseract is based on a recursive time loop.  If the future humans were the ones who sent the wormhole back in time to save us from a doomed Earth, how did those future humans survive to do it?  There should have been no future humans alive to save us.  The only way to explain it is to go into fifth-dimensional physics and play around with multiple universes, but if that's the case, then why bother?  There's an infinity of doomed Earth you'd have to save.If B then A: It's possible that the future humans sent the wormhole back in time not to save themselves, but to save Plan A humans.  The future humans could simply be the descendants of Plan B, who were going to survive anyway because Anne Hathaway unfroze their embryos on the new planet she'd found.  So what they did was save Earth's population by sending the wormhole and tesseract back in time for Cooper to fly through and find.  Me, Me, Me: I almost never geek out about movies, but I just dug this one.  Probably because I saw it with my brother; it was the first time we'd seen a movie in the theater together in over a decade.  He read the novelization and told me it was just a scene-by-scene novelization of the movie; no great revelations there.

Movie Review: Jodorowsky's Dune

Jodorowsky's Dune is a documentary on a failed attempt to bring Frank Herbert's science fiction novel Dune to the silver screen in the 1970's.  It's a brilliant film, told in storyboards and extensive interviews.  Even if you've only seen David Lynch's effort (or worse, the SyFy Channel miniseries) and not read the book(s), you really have to watch this movie.

Alejandro Jodorowsky is a Chilean filmmaker and writer, known best for his bizarre cult films El Topo , The Holy Mountain , and Santa Sangre .  He's also hysterical to watch in this documentary: his enthusiasm for a project decades dead jumps out of the screen, as does his anger and dismay at what happened to it.  In amusing detail he described the hoops he had to jump through to cast Orson Welles as the Baron Vladimir Harkonnen and legendary artist Salvador Dali as the Emperor of the Known Universe, Shaddam IV, for example, as well as special effects wizard
If Jodorowsky was brilliant, what stole the show were Mœbius's storyboards.  Meticulously sketched, the Dune storyboard book is thicker than three Manhattan phone books stapled together.  What Jodorowsky had in mind for the visuals was incredible: it would have revolutionized cinema science fiction at least a year before Star Wars came out.  Legendary artist
Nevertheless, if Jodorowsky's vision of Dune had been made, it would have been a gigantic, artsy mess that had little to do with the original subject matter.  Fans of the book would have been horrified at what Jodorowsky had done to it (at one point in the film, Jodorowsky himself says that he would have raped the novel, like he was raping Frank Herbert himself).  At one point, he'd intended to make the movie about 12 hours long.  So it's no wonder they weren't able to get financial backing from the big studios: it would have been a massive money pit that everyone except the art house crowd would have loathed.

Even so, it made an awesome documentary after the fact.  Five out of five stars.

Friday Links: Bad Hair and Bad Behavior

To quote Marvin Gaye, "What's going on?"At Sean Eaton's invaluable R'lyeh Tribune, we learned about a truly bad hair day: "Medusa’s Coil borrows heavily from some of Lovecraft’s earlier fiction.  For example, there is an artist who paints a ghastly soul shattering portrait that recalls Pickman’s Model (1927)—and perhaps Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890).  The opening is almost identical to that in The Picture in the House (1921), and there are subsequent scenes that are reminiscent of that ill-fated visit to a cannibal’s abode, (for example, a tell-tale spreading blood stain on the ceiling)."Sadie Forsythe has reviewed more books than I've had hot dinners (check out her review of The Blessed Man and the Witch here).  In a recent post, she discussed a recent dust-up on Goodreads with another special snowflake author: "But more importantly, a man banned under numerous profiles really shouldn’t be advising new authors on how to succeed on goodreads. It’s like a Special Snowflake instruction manual—read it, learn to perceive everything as a personal attack and to respond with anger and aggression, then wonder why no one wants to play with you on the monkey bars and throw a hissy. Crazy." It underscores something I learned early on: if you write books and have a thin skin, just leave Goodreads alone.  I write books and have a thick skin, but I leave Goodreads alone myself.At Ginger Nuts of Horror, author Duncan P. Bradshaw talked about Dawn of the Dead: "Here you have a main character who you’ve been rooting for, for the best part of two hours, he’s a bit of a dick, but you still want him to live, especially after the biker attack. The frantic last moments in that elevator, you’re hoping he can get back to Peter and get out of there."At Play With Death, we were treated to a real-life story about a murderous zombie hunter: "There were also zombie mannequins found in Miller’s car, a decommissioned police car. A few people who knew Miller have stated that he frequented horror and fantasy conventions as a ‘Cyberpunk Zombie Hunter’ costume along with his unusual car. For this reason, the press are describing Miller as the ‘Zombie Hunter’ killer."Here, I reviewed two films: The Possession and Resurrect Dead: The Mystery of the Toynbee Tiles .  Also, on Liberty Island, I wrote a piece about adoption and abortion for the anniversary of the Roe v. Wade Supreme Court decision.  Obviously, this is a hot-button topic, which is one of the reasons I didn't post it here.  We should be able to discuss these things, but it's very difficult because of the other issues involved: right to one's person, right to life, the beginning of life, religion, etc.  If you dare to click on it, you'll see my thoughts on the subject, and you can decide for yourself if they're valid.  Just remember that we can disagree on many fundamental things: it's perfectly okay.  It doesn't make one of us better or worse than the other.In other news, I'm working hard to complete the first draft of the sequel to BMW by early March, which is a year after BMW was released on an unsuspecting public.  Blogging will continue.  I'm also reworking some of the short fiction pieces I've written here for submission to relevant fiction sites.