David Lee Summers's Blog, page 9

Over a Century of Nosferatu

In the fall of 1983, I took a German class at the California State College in San Bernardino. That October, my professor handed out flyers for a movie called Nosferatu: Phantom der Nacht directed by Werner Herzog and suggested this would be a good movie for us to watch, listen to the spoken German, and attempt to follow along without reading the subtitles. The movie was the 1979 remake of the famous silent film from 1922 directed by F.W. Murnau. My professor was right, the film was a great one f...

Tony Rogers in the 25th Century!

Happy New Year and welcome to my first post of 2025! Starting a new year feels a little like traveling into the future, so I thought I would take a look at the origins of a classic science fiction character who went to sleep in the 20th century and woke up in the 25th century. In this case, I’m talking about none other than Buck Rogers. He made his first appearance way back in 1928 in a novella published in Amazing Stories Magazine titled “Armageddon—2419 AD” written by Phillip Francis Nowlan. A...

Visit the Weird West in the New Year

I’ve been a fan of Weird Westerns ever since I first discovered the television show The Wild Wild West starring Robert Conrad and Ross Martin. I loved the idea of adding aliens, mad scientists, and maybe even some magic into the west. Later, I would discover comics like Jonah Hex and books like Stephen King’s The Gunslinger, which would increase my appreciation of the genre. Today, I’m highlighting three of Hadrosaur Productions’ Weird Western titles. The first two are short story collections by...

Explore the Human Mystique

I hope you’re having a terrific holiday season and I hope you’ll find 2025 a prosperous and joyful year. As you anticipate the new year, I have two books to recommend written by Don Braden. I have known Don almost literally my entire life. He is a retired high school English teacher from Barstow, California who regularly used science fiction in his classes. As a result, he knows the genre well and brings some truly challenging and thoughtful ideas to his own science fiction stories. On the surfa...

A Quest Worthy of the Angels

I hope you’re having a delightful holiday season! The title of today’s post is inspired by a scene in the first book of my Clockwork Legion series. In it, Fatemeh Karimi asks Ramon Morales how he celebrates Christmas. He mentions that his family sings songs and she asks him to teach her a song worthy of the angels. This is near the start of series of quests that will ultimately take them around the world in hopes of bringing peace and healing where they can. Ramon and Fatemeh aren’t always angel...

A Hybrid Holiday

No, today’s post is not about some new cross-cultural holiday. Instead, I’m talking about the terrific Hybrid series by Greg Ballan. I met Greg Ballan during the time we were both published by Lachesis Publishing. When Lachesis decided not to take any new books for publication, I was fortunate to eventually acquire Greg’s Hybrid series for Hadrosaur Productions. This is a terrific series if you like superheroes. Of course, if you have a super-powered being, you have to challenge him with villain...

Vampires and Long Nights

This year I released my thirteenth novel, Ordeal of the Scarlet Order. It’s also the third novel in my Scarlet Order vampire series. Of course, the long nights of winter mean that there’s more time for the vampires to revel under the stars and the Smashwords End-of-Year sale is a great opportunity to get the complete series at a great price. Smashwords books are available for any e-reader and they are free of digital rights management, so when you buy a copy, you can download it to all of your d...

Short Stories to Enjoy on Long Winter Nights

The annual Smashwords End of Year Sale is underway. Many of Hadrosaur’s titles are on sale and I’ll be highlighting them here at the Web Journal. The coupon codes for these discounts are automatically applied at checkout. One of the things I love about Smashwords is that they provide ebooks in all popular formats and they’re DRM free, so you can download them to your favorite device or gift them to friends without worrying about what e-reader they prefer. If you are shopping for a friend, just c...

Black Adam

After watching and enjoying the Dwayne Johnson film Red One recently, I decided to try another film he’d been in, the DC superhero film Black Adam from 2022. This film actually had been on my radar for a while, since, as far as I know, it features the first big screen appearance of the Justice Society of America, the first superhero team to appear in comics. Looking back, I missed it when it came out largely because of some writing projects that were keeping me busy at the time and the fact that...

Red One

I’ve long been interested in the lore that’s built up around Christmas. It started with the Rankin-Bass holiday film, Santa Claus is Comin’ to Town, which purported to be the story of how Santa Claus came to be a toy maker who moved to the North Pole and then used flying reindeer to deliver toys to everyone around the world on Christmas Eve. Later, I discovered L. Frank Baum’s version of the story titled The Life and Adventures of Santa Claus. Beyond these fantasy stories, I also love hearing ab...