Zombos' Closet

and Falling, Fly Contest

I'm wrapping up my review of Skyler White's and Falling, Fly, so in a nutshell, I recommend it, and I also thought a contest would be in order. For a chance to win a copy of and Falling, Fly, send me your mailing address (my email's in the About page).

As always, your contact information is kept until the end of the contest, then deleted from my inbox. Only I see it. Scary, I know.

So send me an email with "and Falling Fly Contest" in the subject line before the end of April. I'll announce the winner in May.

You must be 18 or older to enter, by the way. Hey, she's not just drawn that way on the cover for nothing you know.

Good luck!

The Nightmare Factory Vols 1,2

ZC Rating 4 of 7: Very Good

Shhh. Listen. That is a furtive step creaking up the basement stairs. Hold your breath. That is a shadow crouching in the corner of the room, and every other room you enter. Breathe in. That is the briny smell of fish scales and water-logged wood, and freshly turned earth filled with bloated worms, and moldering leather-bound volumes crammed onto drooping shelves. Now look. Those crumbling facades of edifice and sanity, cracking and peeling in the mirror behind you, are yours. And yours alone.

Welcome to the eerie world of Thomas Ligotti, an author who is either highly praised or mostly ignored by readers of the horrific, whose stories are adapted in these two volumes from Fox Atomic Comics. Somewhat Lovecraftian in intent, partially E. F. Bleiler-- with a tincture of Robert Aickman--in portent, Ligotti's stories are incessantly bleak and eldritch and filled with uncanny events confronting his displaced, misplaced, and psychically-debased characters. Images of festively-clothed clowns and harlequins, ancient alien things with grotesque appendages, and arcane horrors waiting patiently at your doorstep occupy his imagination. And now yours.

Rosem's Midnight Madness Trading Cards

I was rummaging through Zombos' closet last night and came across this set of Rosem's Midnight Madness trading cards, acquired in 1990. The box set is made up of six delectably creepy and morbid stories written by Steven Kiviat, with each illustrated by Alfredo Osorio in suitably mordant colors.

As an additional treat, the box itself opens into a wonderfully frightening pop-up cemetery scene. The six stories are Shroud of the Undead, The Surgeon, Robot Killer, Jungle Parasite, The Pharaoh's Revenge, and Desert Rats.

I will highlight the stories and cards for you later, but for now, enjoy these glimpses of a superb homage to monsterkid bubblegum-card horror.

Click the images for an eyeful.

 

 

Alice In Wonderland (2010) Or Is It Underland?

ZC Rating 3 of 7: Good (but not so Frabjous)

Once upon a time, mercury was used in the making of hats. It affected the nervous systems of hatters, causing them to go bonkers with mood swings and flights of fancy and trembling distress and, well, to become as mad as a hatter. Which is all well and good to explain the Mad Hatter's unpredictable behavior in Wonderland--or is it Underland?--but what about Tim Burton? He never ever is really ever quite the same, being the same as before, I mean, nor all grown up now will he be again, I'm afraid.

"Look, my good man, I'm going to croak by the time you get to that review. Time to jam the jelly and all that."

I looked around. I was walking in the garden when a low voice, seeming to come from the daffodils, interrupted my reverie. My reveries are often interrupted, but usually by Zombos, not voices coming from daffodils. The flowers had bloomed unusually early this year.

"Down here, and mind your big feet."

I looked down. A toad, dressed in a Harris Tweed suit and driving a very Mini Convertible Cooper, blew puffs of smoke from a long cigar as he looked up at me. He raced the engine, allowing the car to jump forward every now and then. I seem to have a penchant for meeting odd creatures that smoke long cigars and talk when they really should not be able to. Don't they know smoking isn't healthy?

"I beg your pardon?" I said, for want of anything better to say.

"Your review. You know, of Alice In Wonderland. Burton and Woolverton want to do me next."

Newsy Nosey: Oklahoma Horror, Mask-Fest, We're Alive! And Club Moebius

You know what happens to nosey people in horror don't you? They find out all about it. Just before they DIE! But at least they're better informed before they go. So here's some news for you to bone up on; just keep looking over your shoulder as you read...and read fast...

The 1st Annual Oklahoma Horror Film Festival is accepting entries of screenplays, films, and more. More information and submission form are available at: http://www.oklahomahorrorfilmfest.com/submissions.

The festival will be held Labor Day Weekend (Sept 3-5) at the SpiritBank Event Center in Tulsa, OK. Lodging and restaurants are within walking distance of this location. The festival is competitive, with approximately 50-60 films screened and will host a variety of workshops and panels covering various aspects of the film industry and horror genre. Regular Deadline is June 5th, 2010. Final Submission Deadline is July 3rd, 2010. All entries must fall into at least one of the following categories: Horror, Supernatural, Monster, Sci-Fi, Crime, Thriller, Suspense, Cult, or Mental Illness.

From The Zombie Podcast comes the radio drama "We're Alive." 

A small riot in LA has spread past its containment. Three reserve soldiers are called to their deserted duty station. Believed to be the last remaining armed servicemen in the area, Michael, Angel, and Saul witness the true cause of the riot; people are starting to change and attack each other. Armed with only what they can carry, they set out to secure an apartment building and rescue survivors scattered amongst the shattered remains of civilization.

Mask-Fest is a convention that celebrates the artistry of MASKS, MAKE-UP, MONSTERS, and HALLOWEEN! "At MASK-FEST you'll witness aisle upon aisle of independent artists selling and displaying collectible masks, props, models, and every other sort of monstrous goody you can imagine."

"At Mask-Fest you'll be able to meet some of today's top Hollywood make-up effects artists. You'll be able to attend panels, art demos and other ghoulish events that will have your head spinning! And brand new for Mask-Fest 2010, you'll enjoy a museum dedicated to the art of masks, monsters, and make-up!

"The best part of MASK-FEST is that it's held within the Horrorhound Weekend Convention and is free with the purchase of any HHW ticket package! Enjoy everything Mask-Fest has to offer as well as all of the special guests, celebrities, vendors, and events of HorrorHound Weekend."

Club Moebius is a cool fan club for monster model kit fans like me! I recently joined. The membership certificate and Big Frankie patch are super. What's even more super are the club benefits for members. And the ten dollars you spend to join can be used in the Moebius shop online.

"Coming in April, we will have an exclusive Glow Mummy for the Monsterpalooza show in Burbank. A few differences from the standard kit: glow parts of course, a heavier, paperwrap box like the old Aurora-style packaging, and a glow in the dark "Glow in the Dark" sticker on the package. Hopefully that glow ink works as advertised! One of the bonuses of being a club member is the ability to jump the line on the after-show exclusives."  

Creepy Magazine Trading Cards

Dark Horse has released a 50-card set of Creepy magazine covers. In back of each card is a rundown of that issue's stories, along with authors and artists listed. There's also an Uncle Creepy's Fiendish Facts, which details a bit of information about a particular person involved with that issue.

The white card stock is thick but plain, but the cover reproductions are rather good, and the information on the back for each issue is handy to keep, er, well, handy.

Additional cards include the shocking Monster Briefs In Color! advertisement (okay, fess up, I know you ordered them, too), and the ad for the Uncle Creepy and Cousin Eerie masks (wish I had kept mine).

The Best of Joe R. Lansdale: Dark Flavors Over Gristle

What Batman did for me, though, was make me understand that the world was bigger than I knew, that there were things beyond getting out of high school and going to work and waiting for retirement. Like Batman, I wanted to be something special. (Joe R. Lansdale, from his introduction to The Best of Joe R. Lansdale)

Take a big fat oak barrel, pack in Ray Bradbury and Charles Bukowski, slice and dice a few big young scorpions with all six juicy segments of their tails, add some boiled spinach and watery buckwheat, pickle all with half Jack Daniel's Tennessee Whiskey and half Southern Comfort, piss, and spit some chawing tobacco into the mix, then seal it up good. Let the barrel sit for a few years, forgotten, in a beat up Pontiac pickup truck parked in the last row of the last aisle in the last drive-in down a long dusty road. When you finally open it up you'll find an author like Joe R. Lansdale. Just stand back a bit when you do 'cause he might be cussin' up an awful lot and swinging low.

Lansdale is as important an America Original as Mark Twain, only if he had written The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, he'd have had good ole boy Tom bashing Huck's brains in with a tree branch, for chump change and just to see him bleed, on a bright sunny day, close to a white picket fence to show the blood spatter better. Then he'd have Tom go smiling off to eat some warm apple pie as a hungry dog ate the rest of Huck up, with both enjoying every bit of their meal. Slowly.

Reviewing Books: Throwing Your Money My Way

Angela Hoy's Writers Weekly ezine has an informative article this month called Throwing Your Money Away on Review Copies. While it's written primarily for budding authors who are self-promoting their work (i.e., paying out of their pockets), I felt it had some important points we, as bloggers, should be aware of because many of us are budding authors, or simply need to handle book review requests with confidence.

This key bit of advice she offers is essential for both of those perspectives:

7. The way to get book reviews is to approach a potential reviewer up front, addressing them by name, via email, and asking them point-blank if you can send them a copy of your book and a media kit to review. You should also ask them if they want to receive the print version (print book and print media kit) or the electronic version (ebook and electronic file of your media kit).

I've received a few blanket emailings requesting reviews, but most have been addressed to me by name and some are even a bit more conversational, indicating the author (or author's agent/press agent) took the time to know my blog's temperament. When a request indicates familiarity, I'm more inclined to review the book and, conversely, less inclined when it's an Hello Anonymous Blogger, I've got this tremendously exciting book..."insert pitch here." 

That pitch is unimportant to me and should not be important to any potential reviewer. I don't give much weight, either, to authors' quotes regarding other authors' books. I'm actually less inclined to review a book bolstered with authors' quotes. There's something unnatural about that. Well, we couldn't find any 'real' readers or critics, so what did your professional friends say? And one thing I'd love to see more is being offered a digital copy to review. I promise not to distribute it, I swear. It just means less piles of clutter for me to step over (I ran out of book shelves a long time ago; I had to put my DVDs somewhere you know).

Anyway, here are a few rules I strive to live by when blogging book reviews. Come to think of it, these rules can apply to any type of review you might do.

Meet the Horror Bloggers: All Things Horror

Many fans of horror, amateur and professional alike, have devoted themselves to blogging about the thrills, chills, and no-frills side of the genre as seen in cinema and print. In this ongoing series that highlights the writers behind the blogs, we meet the unique personalities and talents that make the online horror scene so engaging. Up close and personal.

In this installment, Mike and Chris from All Things Horror tag team the terror to the delight of their readers.

Mike:

I fell in love with horror around age seven by spending Saturday afternoons in the public library. After soccer games, my Dad would drop me off while he went grocery shopping. For whatever reason, the Dracut library stocked the juvenile section with folklore books. The history of witchcraft, true hauntings, werewolves and vampire mythology were all at my finger tips. These were pretty hardcore-in today’s namby pamby world I can’t imagine there’s much on the kid’s shelves about Vlad Tepes impaling his subjects then dining amongst the carnage, nor stories about ghost that appeared on elevators moments before the cables snapped and the cart plunged, sending everyone to their cruel demise. I gobbled up everyone I could check out. Granted they left me so scared if I woke up in the middle of the night to pee I’d clutch a statue of Virgin Mary in front of me while tiptoeing down the hall, just in case a vampire jumped out of the shadows. Just as fifth grade let out for summer vacation, I finished reading The Amityville Horror. That night I woke up covered in itchy splotches and my skin felt like it was on fire. I was terrified that I’d been turned into some sort of demonic hell spawn. It was the chicken pox.

On Open Letters and Cans of Worms

Chuck Norris Ate My Baby wrote about the tiff over Let's Get Dangerous' Open Letter to Gorezone, which appears to not have been received all that well. I'm surprised, however, that an offensive position has been returned, instead of addressing the points of Jamie's critical opinion expressed in his open letter. To call its contents defamatory and slanderous is stretching things a tad silly. Here's the open letter so you can make up your own mind. Let me know what you think with your comments.

Not to kick Jamie any more, but his grammar needed a bit of proofing, too (you Brits are weird with grammar). I'd like to see Gorezone (and readers of Gorezone) respond to his critical assessment regarding this one issue. If any of you have read the issue, can you corroborate or disagree with Jamie's critique? Civilly.

Here's Jamie's Open Letter To Gorezone (with some additional commas, typos corrected, and my personal observations in bolded italics sprinkled here and there. One last note: it is rather ironic that a blog called Let's Get Dangerous actually lives up to its name.

Congrats on that Jamie.

 

"Dear GoreZone Magazine,

"Firstly, well done for having a glossy and fairly nice looking magazine that has managed to stay afloat during a climate almost designed to make just that very difficult. It is definitely an achievement that a niche magazine has kept on keeping on, and I salute that.

"I first bought GoreZone about a year, maybe a year and a half, ago when the mag was still in its relative infancy and I was thoroughly disappointed (I did the same thing and felt a little disappointment: just not my cup of tea really). So I decided I would stick to Fango. But then yesterday, I saw the mag in a shop in Manchester and spotted a review of Enzo Castellari’s Bronx Warriors movies. So I figured I would give it another whirl.

"Now, I am not one of these guys who gets all heated about grammar and spelling but come on, this is just ridiculous (okay, I thought you said you weren't the type to get all heated about grammar?). I’m assuming that none of your articles get proofread at all as the level of grammar and spelling really is atrocious. Which is something that needs to be rectified if you are going to continue calling yourself “The world’s most upmarket horror entertainment magazine” (bit of a jump here, but I'll stay mum: still just expressing concern, not slander). Basic spelling and grammar are an absolute must for any professional-looking publication, and when you skip on it it makes you look like a bunch of amateurs. And if some Mary Whitehouse type were to pick up the magazine as fodder for her latest crusade against people having bloody fun then she would probably think the horror community is a bunch of uneducated degenerates fixated on big boobs (yet people still read the Weekly World News: go figure*).

"And so in lies my main problem with GoreZone: I don’t like that you assume that all horror fans want to see bikinied-up girls flaunting it around (dear Gorezone: Jamie's on his own with this one). I’m a red-blooded male gorehound who loves the ladies, but when I pick up a horror magazine I want to read about what gory flicks are coming soon and about classic genre flicks that get our jugulars pumping. If I am honest the reviews are well written for the most part, and the features go into some level of depth which is good. Now just sort out the content.

"Females are maligned in this genre we love as pure eye-candy, or examples of pure evil (I agree, but it sells movies and issues because enough males want to see it). This is the most progressive genre in the world (have you seen the DVD shelves, lately?), the genre that showed women can be heroes with films like the Night Of The Living Dead remake, but even though people are striving to make something more of the genre, other people (such as yourselves) are dragging it back down (an argumentative stretch here: which people are striving for what? Get your notes ready). For example, in your Christa Campbell VS Joe Bloggs piece, the question “Are big breasts accessory or necessity?” is thoroughly unnecessary, and Christa’s answer pretty much set the women’s movement back god knows how far “The bigger the better no? You have to get their attention somehow…” (sadly, she's right, whatever we dislike about it: my question is, was this intended as a satirical article?)

"It just really seems like “the world’s most upmarket horror entertainment magazine” is Nuts for horror fans (or even the celebrity obsessed Heat), as opposed to “Vogue for horror fans” as you have printed on your cover.

"Now I’m no prude, I love the movies of Fred Olen Ray, Jess Franco, Russ Meyer and Jean Rollin but with Women In Horror Recognition Month on the horizon, lets just try and remember that there is more to women than lumps of fat on their chests (damnit, okay, but it won't be easy: I'll second the notion. Oh, wait, the month's over!). Be as progressive as the genre (still not seeing that progressive genre yet) allows, and focus more on the horror that all your readers love (you can't presume to know what all of Gorezone's readers would like) as opposed to the scantily-clad ladies (which I assume appeals to at least a percentage of your readers). Imagine what could be accomplished by a truly “upmarket” horror publication from the UK, that focused on movies and the genre rather than the interchangeable commodity that are actors (I don't think actors would like that sentiment: they work hard at horror, too.) that would truly be an achievement!

"So GoreZone please: more horror, less half-naked girls (again, dear Gorezone, this is Jamie's personal request only, and he did say less, not none)
Regards,
Dangerous Jamie"

*Just so we're clear, I find Weekly World News a hoot, though I try not to read it in public.

The House of the Devil (2009) The Devil's In The Details

ZC Rating 3 of 7: Good (technically well done, but unimaginative and lacks scares)

Instead of another homage (like Cabin Fever) or glossy remake (The Texas Chainsaw Massacre), he [Ti West] has come up with a period pastiche that mimics the low-res vibe and look of early-1980s horror, along with the same bad hair and clothes. And he’s done so with more shiver than splat. (Manohla Dargis, New York Times review)

 

There are times, all too often these days, sadly, when I wonder which movie I'm watching; whether it is the one those other critics have seen or a cinema-changeling version of the movie swapped in just to bedevil me. After reading the New York Times' Manohla Dargis' review for The House of the Devil, I can only assume it was the cinema-changeling movie I watched and not the more entertaining, more sinister, and scarier movie she saw. In fact, it was her review blurb on the DVD cover that egged me on to buy it: I admit I fell for that one. I try not to be so gullible, but it does get harder and harder. She said it was "a horror movie with real shivers." I wish I had watched the movie she saw. I didn't shiver a bit. And USA Today's "unbearably suspenseful" blurb helped cinch the deal, although I would say it's more bearably unsuspensful. Boy, have I learned my lesson about hypeful blurbs on DVD covers. In this case I would have even preferred an energetic homage or glossy slick remake.

Lansdale, Queenie, And Calabrese Death Contest Winners

So what if you can't get an Oscar? One-Eye Pirate Pete's got something better. Aarrghhh!

And the winners are:

Copies of Queen Victoria: Demon Hunter go to West Nelson in Michigan and Cecilia Huddleston in Kansas.

A copy of The Best of Joe R. Lansdale goes to Emily Intravia in the Bronx.

And a copy of the Calabrese Brother's They Call Us Death goes to Armando Hernandez in Pamona.

Congratulations to the winners and your treasure is sailing its way to you. Enjoy!