Thanks 2018

     Well, there's still plenty of turmoil in the world, but it's embracing the things we value that helps us get through it.  Hopefully, you have a few big things to be thankful for (for me, it's always about the people in my life).  As in years past, here's a list of some small things that I'm enjoying and that are helping me explore some of my favorite art forms more deeply.

The Man Who Was Thursday by G.K. Chesterton - The world's first conspiracy thriller?  Published in 1908, it's about a poet recruited by Scotland Yard to infiltrate a group of anarchists (the terrorists of the time) and finds himself on their Council of Days, where he comes up against the terrifying man who is Sunday.  It's sinister and hilarious by turns, but flat out nutso from beginning to end.  Centered on dueling philosophies (sometimes literally dueling) and obsessed with disguises (the kind that hide, but also the kind that reveal), the esteemed British author Kingsley Amis called it "the most thrilling book I have ever read."

Mazeworld by Alan Grant and Arthur Ranson - The story of convicted murderer Adam Cadman who is hanged for his crime, only to awaken in the fantasy realm of Mazeworld, where he's forced into battle with dark forces, including the ones he harbors inside himself.  Back on Earth, though, his not-quite-dead body is being carefully studied by dark forces of yet another kind.  The story is epic yet moves at breakneck speed, but it's Ranson's jaw-dropping visuals - gritty, grainy photorealism deepened with tactile surfaces and atmospheric lighting -- that elevates this work.

Room 207 Press - Howard David Ingham's website is a deep analytical dive into many of cinema's greatest cult movies (among other things).  Some of his pieces are trenchant and humorous, like the one on An American Werewolf in London; others are deeply personal and meaningful like the one on Possession.  All of them touch on what lies beneath the stories we see and know, and make an old favorite seem like a new experience

     And, of course, don't leave without your free turkey joke.

Thanks 2017

     On Thanksgiving last year, the country was on the cusp of a momentous change.  Things have not particularly calmed down since then (do they ever, really?), and however you feel that change has paid off for the country, you'd have to agree that things have not exactly become easier or brighter.  But one of the ways we get through it is by finding things we're thankful for, too.  As on Thanksgivings' past, here are a few small things I'm thankful for, that offer sheer enjoyment, but also a deeper perspective on things we take for granted.

All the President's Men by Carl Benrstein and Bob Woodward - As an account of Watergate by the two journalists who broke the story, it's not exactly a light read, nor an escape from the real world.  Adapted into a riveting movie, the book illuminates just how much bigger the story was than the actual break in at the Democratic National Convention headquarters.  Most astonishing is just how deep President Nixon's rabbit hole of corruption went and the lengths he and his people would go to destroy their enemies, both real and imagined.  It happened in the 1970s, but it's still (or once again) a timely read and, ironically, a hopeful one.  Watergate, which felt every bit as cataclysmic as our own era's problems feel now, did change our country forever.  But if we survived that, maybe we can survive a lot more than we think we can. 

Channel Zero: No End House - Comprising the second season of the SyFy Channel's anthology horror series overseen by off-beat horror writer Nick Antosca, this takes the frame of the creaky old scary story standby, the haunted house, and builds something new out of it.  A small group of college-agers are lured by urban myth and social media into a mysterious, intermittently appearing and disappearing house.  Braving its increasingly terrifying rooms, they find that the true danger comes after they leave . . . or think they have.  Creepy, weird and psychologically insightful, this draws its fear from its characters and their relationships and, in a growing pool of TV horror anthologies, puts Channel Zero as the top of the heap.

Cinemaps by Andrew DeGraff and A.D. Jameson - A follow up to DeGraff's Plotted: A Literary Atlas, which provides maps for and commentary on several literary works, this does the same for thirty-five different movies.  You could spend plenty of time pouring over the intricate maps themselves, especially in such clever forms as the multiple time-period representation for Back to the Future, but the perceptive essays that accompany the maps draw insightful new thematic elements out of well-trodden and often-analyzed classics (The Empire Strikes Back and Alien are two particular stand outs).

     Have happy Thanksgiving and take a free, bonus turkey joke while you're at it.

 

The Widow's Broom

     After reading to children professionally for more than fifteen years, I can say it is fairly seldom that a story actually renders them speechless and wide-eyed with the sublime tension of suspense.  It's all the more remarkable when the story is so subtly told.
     Such is The Widow's Broom by Chris Van Allsburg, which tells the tale of a lonely but kindly country widow named Minna Shaw, who inherits the broom of a witch.  Mr. Van Allsburg pairs his customarily evocative, precise and textured art with a way of conveying emotion and meaning that is sheer elegance, achieving a somber subtly nearly unheard of in picture books.
     Still more appropriate to the approaching holiday, The Widow's Broom balances a sense of the creepy with a deep understanding of what its young audience can handle.  It enthralls with a dreadfulness that turns out to be just dreadful enough to utterly delight.
     A treat of the non-standard variety for your Halloween.  

Marianne Dreams

      Marianne Dreams is a children's novel by Catherine Storr, written in 1958, back when such books were a little denser and maybe a little more merciless.  It tells the story of a ten-year-old English girl who is struck with an unexplained illness and, while confined to bed, draws a picture of a house that she begins dreaming about.  The dreams seem to encourage her to add elements to the picture and, as she does so, the dream world of the house deepens and expands.  And that's merely the beginning.
     Though adapted for theater, television (as Escape Into Night) and film (as Paperhouse), Marianne Dreams seems to remain somewhat obscure to mainstream readers.  Possibly this has something to do with its tone, which must have caught readers somewhat off guard back when it was first published.  It is thick with an eerie atmosphere and an uneasy sense of foreboding that is still distinctive in the world of children's literature.  A fascinating walk off the beaten path for adventurous younger readers, it should also prove quite an unusual treat for adult readers whose tastes run toward the ethereally macabre. 

A Dog Has His Day

     The most popular comic in Italy appears to be a the story of "nightmare investigator" Dylan Dog created by Tiziano Sclavi.  Each graphic novel-length issue tells a complete tale of one of Dylan Dog's investigations into all manner of horrific things, both supernatural and not (many stories cleave more to the psychological thriller end of the spectrum).  What makes these stories such stand-outs is their ability to add humor into the mix without diluting the horror or the surprising emotional punch most of the tales pack.  Their most distinctly non-American trait is their tendency to find horror in unexpected, often surreal, places, or to find a new twist on classic horror tropes.  Thus far, the only stories translated into English are to be found in Dark Horse's The Dylan Dog Case Files.  Therein,  an eerie tone and stark terror are both to be found among a deaf and mute who has had the lower half of his body amputated, a man who has been so universally ignored that he turns invisible, a woman awaiting the return of the "monster" who killed her entire family years earlier, a woman who can't tell whether or not she's dreaming, Dylan Dog himself getting locked out of his apartment for an entire night, and the search for a deadly rural landscape secretly hidden in the middle of urban London.
     A recent movie based on the character was reviled by critics, but the comics themselves are unique and thrilling.

Beyond the Pale

     The independent horror director/producer Larry Fessenden got together with some fellow, off-the-beaten-path horror masterminds and came up with a beautifully produced series of audio stories called Tales from Beyond the Pale that harken back to old time radio shows, but have distinctly contemporary tones, themes and content. 
     Every story has a full voice cast and, so far, the two that particularly stand out for me are Mr. Fessenden's own eerie and tragic The Hole Digger from Volume 1 and Graham Reznick's disturbing and semi-surreal The Grandfather (starring Angus Scrimm, the terrifying Tall Man from Phantasm in something of a departure) from Volume 3.
    The absence of imagery, or course, allows imagination to flow in and fill that void, thanks to strong writing -- that's the whole point of doing something in this format, I would think --  and a powerful sense of atmosphere and dread pervades each story.  For my money, that dread, that sense of imminent and inevitable doom, is what makes the most effective horror work.

Horror of Ideas

     When I saw the original Japanese Ringu, it scared the living hell outta me.  I don't scare easily in movies.  It takes something deeply and existentially disturbing to get to me -- it has to be the idea that scares me rather than merely the image or the situation.  The American version, The Ring?  I found it to be well-made and well-acted, but not particularly scary. 
     I find, in fact, that by and large foreign horror movies and stories (particularly but not exclusively Asian ones) are far more effective than American ones.  It strikes me that foreign films/stories deal in archetypes and iconography from their own cultures and thus feel unfamiliar to me, which helps to build a sense of disturbance and discomfort.  Asian countries, of course, have non-European-based cultures, so their symbols feel that much more unfamiliar to me.  At the same time, their seems to be a willingness in many other societies to use horror to deal with challenging and truly disturbing ideas that American purveyors tend not to traffic in.  Why is that?  Well, I'll save my theories on that for another post.  And I don't mean to say that there's no good American horror out there.  Far from it.  Try the work of Thomas Ligotti or Bentley Little (his short story The Washingtonians is a good place to start) for a resonating creepiness that is pent up in the tone and the ideas.  At the same time, I do see Asian horror bogging down a bit in ghost stories lately.  But if you're looking for something off the beaten track of fear, the kind of thing you've not likely seen before, try the books in the Ring Trilogy by Koji Suzuki (the films were based these) and the movies  Oldboy (not a horror movie per se, but definitely horrifying and very fierce) or -- if you dare -- Audition (only watch this if you are prepared for the strongest in scary ideas and horrifying imagery -- I'm not kidding).  
     There's nothing as scary as a new idea.

What's Scary?

     They tell me the novel I wrote is science fiction.  Nothing wrong with that, to be sure, though what I thought I was writing was horror.  Genre lines blur easily enough.  The movie Alien, for instance; is that more sci-fi or horror?  Well if you boil it down, you’ve got a monster stalking victims in an enclosed space.  That sounds like horror to me.  The Terminator, on the other hand (time-traveling robot tries to assassinate future savior of humanity before he’s born), sci-fi all the way.  Don’t even get me started on how Star Wars isn’t sci-fi at all, but fantasy.

    Anyway, I tried to write a book about what scares me.  Monsters don’t, really.  Gruesome death is scary enough, but more shocking than frightening on the page.  The things just beneath the surface that we can't quite see, the hidden truths that guide our existence even though we're not even aware of them, now those are scary: that the world might actually be something completely different than you thought it was; that there’s something out there you don’t understand at all and it’s trying to hurt you and you don’t know why.  Those things scare me.

     If that sounds a little obscure to you, check out two Twilight Zone episodes:  "And When the Sky Was Opened" and "Mirror Image."  Those are two fine, fine examples of what I mean.  Now, why do we like to scare ourselves to begin with?  That’s a whole different post.