Another Brick in The Wall... and Thanks to All of You

It's out! As usual, the folks at Amazon are a good deal faster at getting the material online faster than anyone else, and so the Kindle version of Méliès' Notebook and Other Stories, the companion volume to Persephone's Torch, is first out of the gate. But the ePub version should be up at iTunes very soon, and we'll be sure to let you know right here in this space when that happens.

The Nook version? Who knows? Barnes and (Ig)noble (as my friend BC dubbed them) have been having Technical Difficulties (or that is what they tell me) and their machinery is still grinding away on the NOOK version of Torch a month and a half after that book's release -- and so I haven't even bothered to submit the new book to them just yet. I mean, why bother? The good news is, for all you Nook and other readers, the ePub version that's up at iTunes should work on your reader. If it doesn't, let us know and we'll make it right.

Now then -- if you look in the sidebar over there --> and on the CATAOG page, you'll see that there's more Good News (at least from my point of view!) in the pipeline. Take a look-see, and watch this space for more details about Tinsel*Town in the coming weeks!

... and I promise, I promise, the next few posts will be something more / other than just personal announcements like these! I actually have quite a lot to write about, if only I can sit still long enough to do it!

BTW -- we passed over 31,000 hits on the blog recently, with 2,000 of those coming just last month alone. Thank you to everyone who stops by to visit. I don't say it often enough. In a very real way, this blog has helped to save my life. This is not an overstatement. I was in a bad way a couple of years ago when I started this blog, and writing here is what kept me going. It hasn't always been pretty or nice. It's been what I needed. The folks who take time out of their lives to read what I've put down here have given me a gift that I can never repay.

That's my Thanksgiving message for this year.

Best wishes to all --

-- Freder.

A Leaf from the Notebook

The companion book to Persephone's Torch, Méliès' Notebook and Other Stories, is going to be online at Amazon and iTunes any day now. We couldn't resist showing you a page from the ePub version. The decision that each one of the 21 stories in the book should get its own illustration wasn't the brightest idea I've ever had, but on the whole I had fun making them. Although we're happy with how this one turned out, we're looking forward to next month and the new titles we've begun to work on for 2013. Watch this space for some fun (we hope) announcements! And no, the blog is not just going to become all puff-pieces from here on out. I'm working on some new posts and hope to have them ready soon. There are just way too few hours in the day...

-- Freder.

A Small Preview...

We're putting the finishing touches on our next book, Méliès' Notebook and Other Stories, which will be out next week in Kindle and ePub formats for whatever tablet or software you own (and we might add that it's a great companion volume to Persephone's Torch).

Each of the twenty-one stories included in the volume is illustrated with a photo, cartoon drawing or collage by the author, and we thought we'd give you a look at one of those illustrations as a "teaser" for what's to come. The image above will be appearing in the book with "The NightWatch Man," a story that was originally published in the July 1999 issue of 96 Inc.

We're pretty excited about the new book and we hope that you will like it. As soon as it's out, we'll be announcing our December publication, so stay tuned!

-- Freder.

Premiere of the PERSEPHONE'S TORCH Book Trailer!

Just a Thought

For the upcoming volume of collected stories, one of the pieces that had to be dumped was a well-intended but lousy experimental story that mixed the personal thoughts and experiences of the narrator with a "pitch" that he was making to a comic book publisher, the real and the fantastic uniting into a kind of howl for attention. The gist of the story is that the narrator-writer, who seemingly has fallen on Hard Times, spills out his guts to an editor that he's worked with before and gets a form rejection letter in reply. 

Oh, Tragedy!

I liked the idea behind the story, but in practice this was one piece of cheese that stank too much. In any case, bits of the "pitch" segments had been incorporated into other projects. A very few passages from the "personal" segments could be salvaged, and they were folded into another story that needed some more meat on its bones.

It's called "editing."

Cutting to the chase, there's a paragraph in the first story that I can't find a home for anywhere, but I quite like the sentiment and hate to just leave it in the dustbin. 

Isn't what blogs are for? Here it is:


What right did I have to feel angry and pathetic, to get drunk every night and say boo hoo hoo woe is me? In China, the government was busily butchering students in Tiennamen Square. Eastern Europe was about to explode, taking not just lives, but the things produced by those lives: great architecture, great works of art, great writing. Bridges, books, paintings: because it was not enough for these people to kill their enemies: they had to kill everything that their enemies had ever created, stood for, dreamed about. Which raised the question: in a world of religious intolerance, where works of human beauty, hope, passion, genius are being destroyed in the name of one god or another, is the practice of trivial art a mortal sin?

-- Freder.

Now I'm Feeling Zombified

When it comes to zombies, I am strictly Old School, and believe that everyone else should be, too. Give me the Haitian zombie any day, the zombie of voodoo legend and nightmare, the zombie of the pulp novel and old N’Orleans and Val Lewton. The modern flesh-eating variety is strictly a creation of George Romero, and for that Romero and his horde of even less talented imitators have a lot to answer for. How many times can Night of the Living Dead be remade and ripped off? Is this the single most mindlessly aped movie in history? I think it must be.

Some critics exalt Romero’s work as being laced with Deep Social Commentary. I don’t see it. Sometimes a train is just a train, and for me, Romero's movies have no redeeming social context at all, but simply are what they are: revolting exercises in pushing the envelope as to how far he could get away with shocking the sensibilities.

To the people who find “entertainment” in graphic images of animated corpses ripping out people’s internal organs and feasting on them... well, you go ahead and enjoy yourself. After all, we live in a diseased culture that’s providing you with plenty of material for your perverted wet dreams. Go to town.

Now. All that said, I have a confession to make. And I’ve been hating on the modern zombie for so long that it’s not an easy one.

I don’t read Robert Kirkman’s Walking Dead graphic novels for the same reason that I don’t watch the A&E TV adaptation of them: it’s just more repetition from the same Trough of Ugliness, and I hated it all in the first place. But when Telltale Games brought out its five-part episodic game based on The Walking Dead earlier this year, I was curious enough to look into the project.

First, the creative forces behind Telltale are nearly all former LucasArts employees, largely the same team that gave us adventure game titles like Sam and Max Hit the Road, The Day of the Tentacle, Monkey Island and Full Throttle ‘way back in the ‘90s. If computer games can be said to have had “classics,” those titles all need to be among them. Since forming their own company, Telltale have released an impressive array of titles, including sequels to both Monkey Island and Sam and  Max featuring the original voice casts, as well as ambitious add-ons to Aardman Studios’ beloved Wallace & Gromit. But the new games, although accomplished and enjoyable, just didn’t have the magic, the golden touch, so to speak. Telltale was poised (and they needed) to knock something out of the park.

Enter The Walking Dead. Although I didn’t care for the subject matter, I was impressed by the visual style of the thing, its somber color palette and hand-painted, graphic-novel look. The designers were clearly not going for a digitalized or conventional computer-game appearance. I thought, if they can animate that look effectively, they could have a pretty powerful visual presentation on their hands. 

Then I read I the description, and had to admit that I was intrigued by the kind of thinking behind the gameplay: “This is not another shoot ‘em up: it’s a game that explores some very dark psychological places, revealing that the undead are not the only thing to be afraid of when society crumbles. ... every action and decision you make can result in the story changing around you. This tailored experience means that your story could be very different to that of someone else. ... Live with the profound and lasting consequences of the decisions that you make ... your actions and choices will affect how your story plays out across the entire series.”

Well, I’m a writer and cartoonist. This is like dangling peanut-butter Oreos in front of me. I decided to try the first episode. And once I’d done that, I was All In.

Because Telltale’s The Walking Dead isn’t really a game at all, but a kind of wickedly clever Social Experiment. It puts you in one Terrible Situation after another and then asks you: What would you do? What would you do if you were stuck between a rock and a hard place and you had two, maybe three choices, and all were horrible, horrible choices -- and oh, by the way, Time Is Running Out, you can’t stop to think, because in some situations not making a choice is the same thing as making one and you’ll still have to live with the consequences. Or die with them.

Not only that, but it isn’t just you that you have to worry about. There’s a little girl involved, and you’re responsible for her.

Never mind the zombies. Well, OK, you can’t ignore them. But they’re not what this game is really about. It’s about YOU. It’s about what kind of a person you really are in a pinch, not the kind of person that you say you are. Would you tell the truth about your past, or lie about it? Would you steal the food? Would you give a suicidal person a gun? What if the circumstances were... different? Who do you save when the chips are down?

Although Telltale has had to supply all of the blood and gore that fans of this genre have come to expect, I’ve found that I’m able to get through the worst bits, in part because of the shadows and the muted color scheme that Telltale has built into the design, but also because I’m not a spectator, not just idly sitting back and watching these things happen. In episode one, for example, when a zombified babysitter attacks unexpectedly and the only defensive weapon at hand is a hammer, I know what I’ve got to do. The situation is dramatic enough and visceral enough that my will to survive outweighs my essential squeamishness. 

On the other hand, I do sometimes find myself squinting, closing my eyes and looking away when I can afford to, just as I would in real life.

As advertised, this is not a shooter. There’s a plot and there are characters and you have choices to make just like real life, and it absolutely matters who you align yourself with. There’s even one decision in the first episode that decides which of the other characters survives to travel with you into future chapters. The game asks if you have the strength to do some terrible things, and puts them in a context that makes it meaningful.

Words don’t do justice to how addictive all this is. The evidence can be found on Telltale’s fan forum, where customers frequently wail (not too strong a word) about the plodding, not to say erratic, not to say sadistic release schedule that Telltale has adopted for each new “episode” of the five-part game. Part four recently came out for most platforms; iOS users only just got episode three. The wait between episodes can indeed be excruciating. 

Why? Because we’re so emotionally invested in this thing. It’s not about bashing zombies, not at all. Even in the context of an artificial gaming experience, when people are put in a hypothetical situation with realistic characters that play on their emotions, and then are forced to make awful decisions under extremely stressful conditions... there’s no two ways about it, it’s hard not to become involved. 

Telltale have made monsters of us all.

Episode three contains some of the worst choices yet; during my playthrough, there were times when I was caught off guard and simply dropped the ball, made mistakes, and Bad Things Happened as a result. Now, if I wished, I could go back and re-play those scenes until I got it right, until I achieved the result that I really intended: but in real life you don’t get replays, and I’m playing this very lifelike game as if there was no going back.

-- Freder.

Shake, Shiver, Rattle, Roll... Dem Bones

So, what’s on my Halloween Music Playlist for 2012? I’m glad you asked.

A real good curtain-raiser is Jill Tracy. I never knew of her before this year, and she is one of the best discoveries I’ve made in ages and ages. A little honky-tonk, a little rag, a little Charles Addams, a little Billie Holliday and a little Edward Gorey, this gal just steals my heart (I wonder if she’d eat it). She actually wrote an orchestral score for F.W. Murnau’s Nosferatu. I have to make it a goal to sit down and pair the two before the season is out. “Evil Night Together,” from her album Diabolical Streak, is the opening cut on my 2012 Halloween Playlist.

No Halloween playlist is complete without the Great and Unique Screamin’ Jay Hawkins, and his angst-driven “I Put A Spell On You” contrasts beautifully with Tracy’s opener.

Amberian Dawn is a metal group that’s more melodic than most and employs an operatic female voice in their music to striking effect. They shake the house with “He Sleeps in a Grove” in the number three slot, from their album The Clouds of Northland Thunder.

Contrast is something I like. Fancifulness and Romance are two more things that I like. My fourth song gives me all three, as Captain Hook (in the person of Cyril Ritchard) sings to “Oh, My Mysterious Lady” from the original Broadway cast of Peter Pan.

Another recent discovery, The Birthday Massacre, then rocks the house with their sweetly hard-edged single “In the Dark” at song five.

Always a proponent of unexpected turns, I then chose “Asa’s Death” from Grieg’s Peer Gynt Suite. The version of it that I have, unfortunately, is exceedingly minor. Remind me to track down the brilliant George Szell / Cleveland Orchestra version someday.

Ever hear of a group called Adrian H and the Wounds? Me neither, until I picked up an album called A Dark Cabaret 2 earlier this year... one of my better musical buys. My cut number seven is a delightfully eerie number from them called “Bad Man.” Its theme is circular: you are what you’re obsessed by. In tone, it makes me think of Tom Waits doing really scary circus music.

In the number eight position I chose Par Benatar’s version of the Kate Bush song “Wuthering Hieghts” -- in a nutshell, the never-filmed ghost story segment of the book. I like Kate’s version, but I like Pat’s better. It sacrifices the etherial, but gains passion as a bonus. A standard -- or it should be.

Next we get to Party Down in ElectroSwing style with The Talented Mister & His Berlin Bohemians, playing “Jive the Mood” -- it’s not meant to give you the heebie-jeebies, but the energy is so squirrely that this definitely fits in at a Halloween party. Shake dem bones!

From Cirque du Soleil’s show Quidam then comes a quick little mood-changer, the very wistful “Innocence.”

Nox Arcana is the only performer or group who gets a double hit on my playlist this year, and that’s only because the first song that I selected, the one that I had to have on the playlist, was so short that it hardly seemed representative. So, from their Circus of Lost Souls album, I picked “Spellbound” and “Calliope.” The first is a mournful scratchy-record lament. The second is, well, an arcane calliope in a necromantic sideshow.

“The Monster Mash” just gets too, too much airtime around this time of year, so much that it’s become downright trite... and the even sadder thing is that stations often play third-rate knockoff versions at that. (Hint: if the version of “The Monster Mash” that you are playing is NOT by Bobby “Boris” Pickett and The Crypt Kickers, you had best get out of town on the fastest horse you can find!). But that doesn’t mean that the Kickers can’t be represented, because they turned out a couple albums worth of material, and “Skully Gully” is one of their better pieces. It gets pride of place as the number THIRTEEN song on my playlist.

“Mystic Eyes” by Them is fourteen, followed by the always-sublime Cab Calloway with one of his half a million recordings of “Minnie the Moocher.” I really wanted his “St. James Infirmary Blues,” but it seems I haven’t got a digital copy of that one. Yet. Next Year.

Another cut off the Dark Cabaret album took my fancy, this one by a group called Spiritual Front. “Song for the Old Man” is fine and wistful and eerie and mystical, and being an Old Man myself I appreciate the sentiment. 

 You don’t know the title, at least I didn’t, but you do know the tune, and you’d recognize it if I could play it for you here: a sort of creepy, collagenous, clunky, rag-taggy jazz tune called “Peter Gink” by Six Brown Brothers takes us into the eerier byways of N’Awleans at number seventeen.

There’s a group called Horslips that put out an album called The Book of Invasions yonks ago that I quite liked... just not well enough to buy any of their other albums. I included one of their songs on my Halloween playlist. It’s called “The Power and the Glory,” and it starts out with a simple, spooky organ riff that suddenly erupts and rocks the house down. It seemed apropos.

Raymond Scott is known to all of you from Carl Stallings bastardizations of his music for Warner’s Looney Tunes cartoons. With a title like “New Year’s Eve in a Haunted House,” my number nineteen pick was a no-brainer.

Another recent discovery of mine, the wonderfully odd and outrageous cello-based rock band Rasputina, gets the penultimate entry with a winking, sly short piece called “Utopian Society.” When I listen to it, I see once-elegant creatures of the aristocracy in their fancy gowns and swallowtail coats, frozen at a mile-long table in the Castle Hall, covered in dust and cobwebs.

And my last song on the list, number twenty-one, is a little foot-stomping, fist-pumping rocker with an organ line that puts a period on the whole selection. It’s “Belladonna & Aconite,” by a band that I know nothing about called Inkubus Sukubus, from This is Gothic: The Bat Cave Anthology. They have a gal lead singer, and although it rocks, the song has just a hint of sadness to it, a mournful edge underneath its hard-driving guitar licks. It has a long, slow fade-out. 

That’s what Halloween is, after all: the long, slow shutting down of the year before winter comes and closes its evil fist around us. From Jill Tracy welcoming us to a ghoulishly delicious celebration of life’s impermanence to Inkubus Sukubus’ defiant pounding on the coffin lid, I think my selection covers the season pretty well.

What’s on your Halloween playlist?

-- Freder.

The Bargain Basement and the Pendulum

It's just a fact that you'll do some things you wouldn't normally do when they are dirt cheap. And so it was that I scoffed up a Roger Corman / Vincent Price Double-Horror-Header out of the five dollar DVD bin, thinking at that price I could afford to hate them both.

Tales of Terror was first on the menu, and I'm glad that it was, because that left the 1961 feature The Pit and the Pendulum for this week. With the same writer, same director, same star all working for the same studio and all purporting to adapt Edgar Allan Poe (but really just looting his work for titles, horror set-pieces and the occasional one-liner), this is a virtual second helping, with one major difference: this is probably the first-ever Roger Corman movie that I could watch without holding my nose.

Surprised? I was. Maybe he had a better than average crew. Maybe he had a bigger than average budget. Maybe for once in his life he decided not to sleepwalk through the making of a movie. I don't know the reason. I just know that, "praising with faint damns" as a friend of mine likes to say, The Pit and the Pendulum doesn't stink on ice.

Which doesn't mean that it's good, exactly. But it's not inept and it has its moments and the finale actually has a colorful, spirited look about it that I've never, ever seen in a Corman movie before.

Price walks the fine line between comedy and drama quite well for the most part, slicing the ham just right barring one scene in which grief is supposed to get the better of him. And Oh! The Agony! He leans against a bedpost and buries his face in his hands. By the end of the picture, of course, his character is intended to have completely gone around the bend, and so Price has permission, so to to speak, to munch on the carpets and chew the curtains to his heart's content -- and chow down he does, with relish, ketchup, mustard and glee. Not since the days of the silent pictures have I seen madness presented with such histrionics, and you know what? It's okay. It's Vinnie. It's what he does.

The rest of the cast -- well, Barbara Steele was brought in presumably on the strength of her work in Mario Bava's barbaric Italian "gallo" horror pictures, in which she was called upon primarily to a) look great, b) be tortured to death, and c) lie perfectly still with her eyes as wide open as possible... and that's essentially what she gets to do here, although this being a strictly "made in the USA" picture circa 1961, her fate is not nearly so gruesome as what Bava routinely dealt out to her. John Kerr is on the set to look stern and serious and to keep his face as absolutely straight as possible, presumably to act as a counterbalance to Price; and the rest of the cast are simply third-rate Hollywood hangers-on for whom this probably represents a highlight of their career. Some fates are worse than death.

In his able, workmanly way, Richard Matheson managed to carve a sensible and appropriately gruesome movie-length plot out of Poe's decidedly bare-bones short story. We have scary castles and torture chambers and a Love to Defy the Ages that was Snipped Short in its Youth. We have Secret Passages and suspicious domestics and harpsichords playing in the night -- all the trappings that affairs of this sort are supposed to have.

Corman directing as if he gives a damn is not the same thing as saying that Corman has talent: that would be going too far. But it came as a pleasant surprise to this jaded fright-fan to stumble across a Corman picture that was actually competent, that not only attempted mood but sometimes -- wonder of wonders, Halloween miracle of Halloween miracles -- achieved it. The Pit and the Pendulum doesn't have one original bone in its body; even its cobwebs have cobwebs. But it's possible, barely possible, to look at this picture and wonder whatever happened to the director that made it.

-- Freder.