The Curse of the Forgotten Fedora

January 10, 2012
cool stuff, friends, secret identity
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I forgot my hat when I left the house today, which was an unusual and discomfiting experience for me. As such, I of course posted about it to various social media, explaining how, if I were a character in a turn-of-the-century book, this would be indicative of panic or emergency of some kind. It was generally agreed upon by my commentors that even in this enlightened era, it could not be looked upon as anything less than a dire omen. So traumatic and far-reaching was the experience, that it was actually immortalized in art by the supremely talented Drazen Kozjan, as can be seen below:

More Fungus of Terror!

January 9, 2012
fungus of terror
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Less than a week to go before the start of the open reading period for Fungi, the anthology of weird fungal fiction (guidelines here) that I’ll be co-editing with Silvia Moreno-Garcia for Innsmouth Free Press. (The open reading period is January 15th through February 15th, in case you missed it.) I’ve already talked a little bit about what I’m hoping to see in the slush, but I promised that you’d be hearing more from  me before the reading period began about some of my favorite fungus stories and creatures, so, without further ado, let me talk about a few of those in brief.

Of course any discussion of weird fungal fiction pretty much has to start with William Hope Hodgson’s “The Voice in the Night.” If you haven’t already read it, I’d definitely recommend giving it a look or, if you’re so inclined, a listen, since the fine folks at Pseudopod recently did a production of it. I also recommend checking out the Toho movie adaptation Matango (aka Attack of the Mushroom People, aka Fungus of Terror). It’s surprisingly effective, wonderfully bizarre, and a major favorite of mine. Also, it has some of the best fungus creatures you’re ever likely to find, especially in cinema, where fungus creatures experience a sad dearth.

Where is there not a dearth of fungus creatures, you might ask? Well, video games seem to boast a larger roster of them than just about anyplace else. One of my favorites of those are the “moldy corpse” enemies from Castlevania: Portrait of Ruin. Described in the in-game bestiary as “A human consumed by evil after eating a cursed mushroom,” the moldy corpses look like purple zombies with blue hair who stumble toward you and then keel over, dropping to their hands and knees as giant, vibrantly-colored mushrooms burst from their back and they crawl forward under their new fungal weight.

I’m certainly not the only person fascinated by Hodgson and “The Voice in the Night.” I was actually turned on to Hodgson’s work by Mike Mignola, who has mentioned Hodgson many times, and put a couple of homages to Hodgson’s Sargasso Sea stories (and “Voice in the Night” specifically) in his comics. The first one was the Hellboy mini-series “The Island,” which was originally supposed to be much more Hodgson-inspired than the final product turned out to be. See the back matter of the Strange Places collection, where you can see pages from the uncompleted original version of “The Island,” which feature some really brilliant fungus people in all their Jack Kirby-by-way-of-Hanna-Barbera glory.

Mignola dipped back into the Hodgson fungus creature well with his first Baltimore comic mini-series, and from the looks of the covers we may be getting some more fungal horror from Mignola very soon in the forthcoming B.P.R.D. mini-series “The Pickens County Horror.”

That’s just a tiny sliver of the fungal stories and monsters I’ve enjoyed, without even dipping into things like myconids, the writings of Jeff VanderMeer, or short stories like Brian Lumley’s “Fruiting Bodies,” to name just a few, but hopefully it’s a place to start. I plan to update throughout the open reading period, giving some insight into the process and what I’m seeing in the slush, and I can’t wait to read as many fungal stories as possible, so if you’re on the fence about submitting, please, pile them on!

Another Story

December 30, 2011
news
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My story “Black Hill,” which originally appeared earlier this year in Historical Lovecraft, has now been revived in audio form thanks to the fine folks at Pseudopod. Longtime readers may recall that Pseudopod previously did an audio version of my story “The Worm That Gnaws” and knocked it completely out of the park, so I’m very excited to have them produce another of my stories.

Check out “Black Hill” here, and if you previously missed “The Worm That Gnaws” it’s still available here.

On Fungi

December 19, 2011
fungus of terror, innsmouth free press
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On the heels of the Fungi anthology guidelines, my co-editor Silvia Moreno-Garcia has made a post about what she’d like to see in the slush, and I figured it would behoove me to attempt something along similar lines. Mine will probably ramble more than hers, and be less immediately helpful and bullet-point-y, but hopefully it’ll be at least a little informative if you’re thinking of submitting to our little fungus anthology. (Please do!)

Silvia talked about wanting stories that straddle genre. (Steampunk, etc.) And yes, we definitely want those stories. But I also admit to having a soft spot for a good traditionally weird or supernatural tale, and I’d love to see some of those, too. There’s a lot of good places you can go with a science fiction-ish angle on a fungus story, but my particular partiality is for supernatural tales, so I’m hoping to see a good mix of those in the slush, too. If in doubt, aim for menacing and atmospheric and creepy, as well as fun and inventive, and you’ll probably hit my wheelhouse.

The stories that got me interested in this theme in the first place were William Hope Hodgson’s “The Voice in the Night” and the Japanese film adaptation of same Matango. So while we obviously can’t do an anthology of nothing but mushroom people (and wouldn’t if we could), I’ll be very sad if we don’t get at least a few stories along those lines. (Probably no danger of that.) I’ll also be talking sometime in the coming days about some of my favorite fungus monsters from books, movies, video games, etc.

But your fungus monsters certainly don’t have to fit the Hodgson mold (no pun intended) to pique my interest. Feel free to go nuts making the weirdest fungus creatures you can come up with. One of the world’s largest organisms is a fungus, just to give you an idea. Nor are we only looking for stories of fungus monsters. As long as fungus plays a prominent role, then odds are we’re interested in taking a look.

Okay, so that’s some of what I’m looking for. How about what I’m not looking for? I don’t want to go into that too much, because there’s no rule I can make that won’t find an exception if the right author is doing it, but here’s a couple of caveats:

Not necessarily Lovecraftian. Don’t get me wrong, I’m a big fan of Lovecraft, but this being an Innsmouth Free Press book and Lovecraft’s work being as associated as it is with fungus, I don’t want to give the impression that this is Fungal Lovecraft that we’re doing here. Lovecraftian fungus stories certainly won’t be turned away at the door, and I’m expecting and even hoping to get a few, but don’t feel constrained to that. We’re looking for a wide range of weird fungal spookiness, so go to town.

Think twice about Cordyceps zombies. Again, I’m not saying don’t do them, but they’ve been all over the Internet lately, and I’ve already heard several people talking about them in relation to this anthology, so I have a feeling we’re going to get inundated with them. So if you’ve got a really killer Cordyceps zombie story, by all means, we want to see it, but just be warned that you’ll probably be part of a pretty big crowd.

Like Silvia, I won’t really know what I want until I see it, but this will hopefully help give an idea of where I’m coming from. Like I said, I’ll be posting in the coming days some more about some fungus creatures and stories of which I am particularly fond, and I’ll also try to give updates once the slush starts rolling in. As I’ve said before, this anthology is literally the culmination of a dream I’ve had for many years now, and so I’m very, very excited to see it come together. And if you have any questions or just want to talk fungi, please feel free to contact me here or at any of my various social networking whatevers.

Free Story!

December 13, 2011
never bet the devil, news
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My story “The Reading Room” was originally published in Bound for Evil, edited by Tom English. It went on to get me my first-ever honorable mention from Ellen Datlow, and the anthology itself was nominated for a Shirley Jackson Award, so it’s a story I’m pretty proud of. It’s also going to be one of the stories in my forthcoming collection Never Bet the Devil & Other Warnings, and as a preview my publishers have made it available as a stand-alone story on Kindle (and Kindle apps). What’s better, it’s free for a limited time!

If you pick up this release, you not only get a sneak peek at the title illustration that the fabulous Bernie Gonzalez did for the story, but you’ll also get access to some special “bonus content” that I wrote especially for this release. All for the low, low price of $0. So, please, check it out!

Fungus Anthology Guidelines!

December 7, 2011
fungus of terror, innsmouth free press, news
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It was a couple of years ago at Readercon when I first pitched the idea of a weird fungus anthology. Not to a publisher or anything, just to the writers around one of the tables in the bar. But even before that, I’d been thinking about it for a long time.

There’s a rich vein of fungal stories that runs through weird fiction, from Hodgson’s “Voice in the Night” through Lovecraft’s “Fungi from Yuggoth” all the way up to Jeff VanderMeer’s Ambergris books and others, but, to the best of my knowledge, it’s never been mined into an anthology gathered around that theme. Until now.

When I first started writing columns for Innsmouth Free Press, one of the first movies I mentioned to Silvia was the Japanese mushroom-person classic Matango, which she said traumatized her for life. The rest, as they say, is history.

Which is all an incredibly long-winded way of saying that, after talking about it and thinking about it for years, I’m finally going to be co-editing an anthology of weird fungus stories, alongside Silvia, for Innsmouth Free Press. To say that I’m excited about this project would be the worst kind of understatement. We’ve solicited some exciting authors, the official guidelines have gone up as of yesterday, and I’m looking forward to hopefully seeing lots and lots of awesome fungus stories come pouring in once the reading period begins. Between now and then–and throughout as well, I’m sure–I’ll be posting more about the anthology, about what I’m looking for as an editor, about some of my favorite fungus monsters, and so on, so stay tuned!

Insidious & Dead Silence

November 14, 2011
cinema
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I haven’t been paying attention, and so I don’t know what the cool position is on Insidious. I know that it was kind of a big hit, so it’s probably cool not to like it, but I hopefully have the excuse of ignorance when I say that I caught it over the weekend without very high expectations, and actually sort of loved it!

First off, yeah, it’s kind of scary. Mostly, it makes good use of the “there’s someone in a place where someone shouldn’t be” kind of fear, which is always pretty effective, though it undercuts itself in that department by overplaying its hand several times. A shapeless figure pacing on the balcony is terrifying. That same figure appearing in your bedroom and turning out to be a stringy-haired guy in a trenchcoat? Less terrifying. But while the scariness is what most people talk about when they talk about Insidious, it isn’t why I loved it.

I loved the parts that are probably the parts that most people hated, if they hated it at all. I loved the theatricality of it. I loved the sudden tonal shift near the middle of the movie. I loved the ghost hunter guys with their homemade equipment and their bickering. I loved how comic-booky it all became, especially as it neared the home stretch. I loved that this was a simple haunted house movie that had an internal mythology, and by internal mythology I don’t mean “explanation for why the house (or boy, as the case may be) was haunted,” but rather I mean an entire internal mythology, complete with underworld and demon figures. I loved the way the title came up, and I loved that the movie escalated weirdly from a really quiet, unstylized thing into the crazy crap of the last half-hour or so.

I didn’t love the “the terror continues” ending, but I will give it this over other such obligatory endings that I’ve seen over the years: at least they set it up.

Fundamentally, there were missteps, probably lots of them, but none of them really impaired my enjoyment. In fact, a lot of the time they sort of increased it. After watching it I compared it to a dark ride, you strap in and the movie goes along, hitting both scary and goofy, without ever really falling too firmly on either side of that equation. If you want to know how much I liked it, I’ll tell you this: I’m considering watching Saw (which I hated) again, just to compare James Wan’s weird vaudeville horror aesthetics from movie to movie. And I liked it enough that I did rush down to the video store to check out Dead Silence (also directed by Wan), which I’m a little surprised I hadn’t seen earlier because, frankly, haunted ventriloquist dummies!

While Insidious owed at least a structural debt to Poltergeist, Dead Silence is just as beholden (if not moreso) to a different staple of the horror movie landscape; the guy who goes back to his hometown after suffering some trauma. Think Darkness Falls, only better.

After watching Insidious and remembering Saw, James Wan seems like the perfect guy to make a ghost story about a murdered ventriloquist seeking revenge through her dolls. And he kind of is. The movie suffers a little from inertia in spots, and from having a blank slate as a protagonist, but it pays off big in aesthetic. It’s a good mid-point between the other two movies I mentioned, spookier than Saw and gorier than Insidious, and Wan and co-writer Leigh Whannell (who also worked together on both Saw and Insidious) put together a story that’s equal parts ghost story, Gothic story, and Goosebumps story (the killer puppets, the rhyme, the fact that the town is called Raven’s Fair and has a lake called Lost Lake). The town actually bears mentioning, because it’s the most Gothic town in all of Gothic County. Not only does our protagonist hail from a rich family that lives in a forbidding manse, not only is there constant ground fog and a doll cemetery, but the aforementioned Lost Lake has a ruined theatre built out onto the water that you can only get to by boat. As far as aesthetics go, this thing is aces.

Really, I found the whole thing pretty likable. It’s not as close to a home run as Insidious, but, like Insidious, I fell in love with the weird Gothic-by-way-of-Darkness Falls-by-way-of-Goosebumps tone of the whole thing. And it also pays some good dividends in gruesomeness by the end, with the requisite creepy corpse/puppet imagery. Plus it has the benefit of playing “recognize the b-list actor,” as it’s staffed with folks like True Blood‘s Jason Stackhouse, Adelai Niska from Firefly, Mark Wahlberg’s brother, and professional “that guy” Bob Gunton.

So, I guess the point of this is that I may kind of be a fan of James Wan. I wonder if this means I have to re-watch Saw now after all…

Carnacki in “The Reading Room”

November 14, 2011
cool stuff, on writing
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This is going to be a short post, but I couldn’t go without mentioning that the incredible M.S. Corley has been so kind as to take inspiration for his latest Carnacki pin-up from one of my own stories:

The story is “The Reading Room,” which first appeared in Bound for Evil from Dead Letter Press, and which will be reprinted in my collection Never Bet the Devil & Other Warnings. It’s a favorite of mine, so I was really thrilled when Corley decided to use it as a point of departure for his latest Carnacki drawing.

If you don’t follow me on Google+ or Facebook or other such places, this may be the first you’ve heard of Corley’s version of Thomas Carnacki. Basically, Corley has been drawing his own version of William Hope Hodgson’s famous paranormal investigator in a series of incredible pin-ups, some of them drawn from Hodgson’s own Carnacki stories, some from other classic weird tales, some just from Corley’s own imagination, and, of course, one from my own tales. To say that this was a big thrill for me would be the worst kind of understatement. If you’ve not seen Corley’s earlier Carnacki pieces, you can see them all here.

Hellboy: House of the Living Dead

November 9, 2011
comics, mignola
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It’s no surprise that any new Hellboy book is a big deal for me, so I was very excited to get my copy of Hellboy: House of the Living Dead last night. I wrote up the following review, which is copied from my Goodreads account:

Normally I’m not a fan of what I think of as “gimmick” stories. All too often, the gimmick is all they have going for them. In less capable hands, the stand-alone “Hellboy in Mexico” one-shot comic could have been one of those gimmick stories, but instead it became one of my very favorite Hellboy stories to date. Instead of just resting on the concept of Hellboy teaming up with luchadors to fight vampires, Mignola invested the book with a surprising amount of pathos. So when I heard that there was going to be a follow-up graphic novel, I was ecstatic, and when I heard that it was going to be a nod to Universal’s “monster rally” pictures, I was doubly so. And House of the Living Dead doesn’t disappoint.

As an homage to the Universal monster rally films it is almost beat-for-beat perfect, including the weird tendency of those films to wall off each monster’s story from the others, and a late-in-the-comic gag about the suddenness and ease of Dracula’s death in each of the Universal House of … movies. It also manages to be a pretty good homage to classic Mexican horror cinema, and really does feel sort of like what might have happened had there been a Mexican version of House of Frankenstein, only now with added Hellboy.

Once again, the art chores play to Corben’s strengths, with lots of ruined buildings, brambles, and other weird stuff. Several panels are as good as any he’s ever done, including the one that was wisely chosen for the back matter of the book, and his gawky, awkward, slope-shouldered Frankenstein’s monster is very effective.

House of the Living Dead isn’t quite as poignant as “Hellboy in Mexico,” but it comes close, especially near the end. There’s a really spectacular moment between Hellboy and the monster in a bar, and the last pages are a nice foreshadowing of the forthcoming Hellboy in Hell storyline, a way to bridge these older stories with what’s happening in current Hellboy continuity.

It’s no secret that Mignola can pretty much do no wrong in my eyes, but he’s really struck a rich vein with these stories of Hellboy’s “lost weekend” in Mexico, so I’m really glad to know that we’ve got more of them to look forward to, including at least one short one drawn by Mignola himself!

Birthday Loot

October 31, 2011
cool stuff, secret identity
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I’m not normally one to post things like this, but this year my friends and family were so incredibly generous with birthday gifts, that it just seems like it would be ungrateful not to share tales of their largesse. The photo below is a record of what I believe are all the presents I received for my birthday this year, except for the already-documented awesomeness of Playmobil Solomon Kane.

From the top, left to right, that’s a new pair of headphones, four bound volumes of books of weird phenomena and conspiracy theories called The Unexplained, The Book of Cthulhu, the Leonard Cohen Complete Columbia Albums set, The Collected Ghost Stories of E.F. Benson, The Best of Gahan Wilson, a Warner Bros. Horror/Mystery Double Features set (including Sh! The Octopus), a copy of Dominion (which is maybe my new favorite game ever), and a copy Mansions of Madness (which I haven’t gotten to play yet). Thanks for the bounty goes (in no particular order) to Jesse, Lydia, Sandy and J.T., Larry, Jessy and Allen, Christine, Christy, Charlotte and George, Kenny and Nicole, Richard, Lindsay, Jason, Veronica, and of course my lovely wife.

The star attraction was the aforementioned Leonard Cohen collection. Let’s get a shot of that here:

Nom!Omitted are the pictures where I’m rubbing them on my face and/or putting them down my pants. Seriously, these albums are amazing. First of all, pretty much every Leonard Cohen album. Second, holy shit remasters! These albums sound incredible. I’d try to come up with some kind of metaphor for what they sound like, but in my efforts to do them justice I would just end up descending into complete nonsense and compare them to diamond unicorn kisses or something, and nobody wants that. Short version, these albums are amazing. I had been publicly drooling over them over on my Google+ and Facebook accounts, and my wife (who is the best person ever, it’s just science) got several friends and family members to chip in to buy them for me. For everyone who threw money into that pot, you have my thanks. It might be the best birthday present I ever got. And to everyone else who got me presents this year, thank you too! Your presents are all close seconds to that Leonard Cohen set.

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