From Zombos' Closet

What's It All About, Igor?

Zombos' Closet...a vast trove of endearingly cheap thrills, including movie and book reviews, and scans of his collections of cinema pressbooks, goofy paper-cutout Halloween decorations, and his amazing collection of Mexican lobby cards from B-grade films. If you have time to descend into a serious rabbit-hole of marvelous trash-culture nostalgia, visit that site just as soon as you possibly can. (DangerousMinds.net)

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Hybrid: Misfits, Monsters and Other Phenomena Edited by Donald Armfield and Maxwell I. Gold

My review for Hybrid: Misfits, Monsters and Other Phenomena first appeared in The Horror Zine. It is reposted here with permission.

 

Editors Donald Armfield and Maxwell I. Gold have taken their book, Hybrid: Misfits, Monsters and Other Phenomena, very much to heart in selecting the poems and stories within (a hybrid format in itself), to include bizarro, noir sci fi, sword and sorcery, and speculative fictions for a reading that has something for just about anyone. These tales will either provide you with a straightforward reading or something to puzzle over, leading your thoughts to deeper meanings. Or maybe no meanings at all, just some go-with-it and enjoy moments. A good collection of mixed authors should always make you want to seek out their other works and this book will certainly have you doing that. It should be noted too that the cover design and illustration by Luke Spooner (we often overlook the graphic designers when doing reviews, don’t we?) is quite good.

The first story, Making Friends, is a comedy of errors involving a happy dog, a curious but unhappy creature, and a couple of farmers meeting the neighbors they never knew they had. Angela Yuriko Smith paces it all into a 1950s sitcom-like nocturnal interlude for Miriam and Bill. It is a good choice as the opening story, breezy and light, and visually funny: there be monsters here, but they are not all gloom and doom and gory pieces.

That is, except for what happens to the villagers in the Ruination of the Gods by Dr. Chris McAuley (Stokerverse) and Claudia Christian (Babylon 5 and Wolf’s Empire: Gladiator). A wizard tries to raise the dead but gets caught. As all diligent readers know by now, what happens to people who get on the wrong side of wizards, caught in the act of doing questionable things, means terror to come. Kail, the Conan-like warrior (or Kali, since the proofreader must have been out to lunch with this one), ignores the giant stew-pot death waiting for him for doing the same punishable act and gets into trouble quickly. Luckily for him the monsters from the sea provide a bloody good diversion for the villagers. While this story uses the standard sword and sorcery approach (an angry wizard, a beguiling witch, and a warrior torn between duty and personal need), McAuley and Christian handle the action, the gory pieces, and the tragic fallout of his decision well, leaving the path open for future adventures.

If you lean towards a 3 Stooges-like bizarro storyline, go to Hopital Automatique by D. Harlan Wilson first. It defies description, as any good bizarro fiction should, but if you have watched the 3 Stooges in the comedy short, Men in Black (1934), that provides a bit of a warm-up to the absurd mayhem wrought here. It is an I-don’t-know-what-is-happening narrative and therein lies the fun. The pace is frenetic, the characters and milieu insane, and this opening line will sum it all up for you: “The car didn’t run over the nurse until she had changed my bedpan and injected a second dose. It was a Datsun.” I question how a Datsun got into his hospital room in the first place, but at least it was not an elephant*, and that second dose sounds like a clue. On the plus side, she did manage to change his bedpan before being run down. The only other meagre clue I can give you for this one, without giving up and speaking to Wilson first, is that Hopital is the French word for hospital. For the rest, you are on your own.

More sensible humor will be found in Alicia Hilton’s Savages Anonymous. A funeral home basement in Trenton, New Jersey, provides haven for a nude extraterrestrial with two heads, an extraterrestrial arachnid and other assorted aliens—along with some mutants—griping about the challenges of getting along with humans. A boy’s ghost interrupts their proceedings, sending Xapanna (the two-headed alien) on a vendetta for the boy’s murderers. The Crime Stoppers Tip line sends her in the right direction. The action and humor are conveyed through very short paragraphs, many one to two lines long, and an endearing ending that ties back to the difficulty of getting along with way-out others.

The Scoocoom of Big Rock Mountain is a more serious weird western with a more traditional approach to hybrid terror. Taking place sometime between the 1860s to early 1900s, a former buffalo hunter, Max, now sheriff, has family and Big Foot problems (skookoom is a Chinook word meaning Big Foot). Max, having helped to decimate the Indian tribes by hunting the buffalo to near extinction, is partially responsible for the scoocoom putting the bite on the settlers for its food source. Max also has a drinking problem that makes his aim a bit tricky and his step a lot unsure. Once you get past the proofreader still out to lunch (scoocoom flips to skoocoom a few times), Michael Knost delivers a simply plotted western with all the right emotional and weird elements for his characters and events.

The Big Foot theme is seen again in Maero by Lee Murray, a poem where a day packer is enjoying his hike until he comes across a severed limb and “glossy giblets quivering.” This first-person account with the Maero (Māori for Big Foot) is not the usual “train-train” encounter. A sadder one is to be felt in Kolkata’s Little Girl, in which Bandhura is “waiting, in front of a blue-clothes shop for someone to tell her story.” A too long and heavy mala hangs around her neck, hinting at a deeper meaning hidden among the poem’s lines. Alessandro Manzetti’s acheri is haunting and begs for a longer treatment.

There are many hybrids to be found in this collection of twenty stories and poems. The editors have crafted an engaging reading experience across genre types, of which this review has only scratched the surface. As Dark the Night will trap you in Stella’s depression-fueled shadows; the noir science-fiction Vis-à-Vis puts you there in Punktown among the low-lives and no-lives; and Slo-Mo will make you mind the sloths and give them a wide berth and forget the selfies. All these stories make for an enjoyable and rewarding experience.

*For those not familiar with the Marx Brothers, the reference comes from Groucho’s quip as Captain Spalding: “One morning I shot an elephant in my pajamas. How he got to my pajamas I don’t know.”  Feel free to also substitute proofreader for elephant if you are so inclined.

The Secret Code (1942) Pressbook

Columbia focused on World War II saboteurs with The Batman and The Secret Code serials. In The Batman, J. Carrol Naish played Dr. Daka, a Japanese mastermind, who, with his henchmen, tangled with the caped crusader. In The Secret Code, the evil Nazi mastermind, Jensen, is played by Trevor Bardette. J. Carrol Naish, again sporting ludicrous makeup, played Charley Chan  in the 1957 television series, The New Adventures of Charlie Chan. During an interview conducted by Ben Mankiewicz, the 93 year old James Hong, who played Chan's Number One Son, mentioned how Naish had him fired from the show because he missed a line. My respect for Naish has dropped quite a bit after that revelation. How absurd too: Naish gets the real Asian actor fired. Wild. 

ComicRack and YACreader version: Download The Secret Code pressbook

The Secret Code (1942) Herald

Here is the theater herald for The Secret Code (1942) Columbia serial. The Black Commando, a competing action hero to Republic's Spy Smasher, fights Nazis through fifteen chapters. See The Files of Jerry Blake for a detailed decoding of the serial. Interestingly, especially for a kid into cool stuff, the code tutorials at the end of each chapter were informative. I wonder how many kids sent around coded notes in their classrooms after seeing The Secret Code?

 

Three Strangers (1946) Pressbook

Give me any movie with Sidney Greenstreet and Peter Lorre in it and I'm already sitting with the popcorn or wine or beer or (insert your own beverage or food of choice), and I'm golden. Put a little rain in the sky, a little dark in the streets, and  a cozy couch or chair to go limp in, and I'm more than golden. Of course, add a theater balcony (remember those?) and a big screen, and I'm in heaven, pure and simple. This movie is such an odd little gem, with fate, destiny, and tangled webs of lives between the two, all bottled up by a sweepstakes ticket and a fascination with a small, hopefully wish-granting, statue.  

ComicRack and YacReader version: Download Three Strangers Pressbook

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I Shot an Arrow...

Here's a picture of me (recently fallen out of a photo album) that captures some of the zeitgeist of the 1960s. I'm pretty sure this was taken at 1000 Acres Dude Ranch (though they call it a horse ranch now). I'd be stuck there for much of the summer, anxious to get back to my comic book and monster magazine racks and color television (a Sony Trinitron). I remember one summer I almost missed a critical Fantastic Four issue with the Silver Surfer and Galactus, but, luckily, when I got back home from the ranch, the corner luncheonette, which was awesome for getting my monthly comic and magazine fix, had been closed for vacation too. I didn't miss the issue! It was still on the rack waiting for me.

But the ranch wasn't all that boring for a Brooklyn kid. I learned how to shoot an arrow, row a boat, play pool, tilt a mean pinball, play ping pong and shuffle board, and ride a horse without falling off. Getting on was always a challenge, and one fine day a horse stepped on my foot and refused to move. Man, that hurt like a son of a... All of that was fun (sort of) but my point is more related to those arrows and bow in the photo. I'm pretty young there.  Those arrows were steel tipped. I shot them into fabric targets wrapped around straw, about 10 or more feet away. No fencing, no protections for bystanders or passersby, and I'm, like I said, pretty young there. If that doesn't say much about where we've been and how paranoid and litigious we've become, I can't think of a better illustration. I also remember one summer when I walked into the ranch's management office and up to the counter. I asked for the bow and arrows  and was told they had discontinued it. Some idiot kid had aimed the wrong way and that was that. He ruined it for the rest of us. 

And isn't that always the case? It's always some idiot messing up the good stuff for the rest of us; or complaining about the good stuff and how evil the rest of us are for liking it; or preaching about how bad the good stuff is for the rest of us and we must return to the light. Seems there are a lot more idiots these days than back in the 1960s. I miss the comic and magazine rack. I miss Joe's corner luncheonette. But mostly I miss the good stuff we can't have anymore because of so many idiots now ruining it for the rest of us. 

Perhaps that's why I like horror movies so much. It's pretty much the only genre where the idiots always get their due. Go monsters!

Atom Man vs. Superman Pressbook (1950

Unfortunately, without the boffo effects of today, this serial pales in comparison to today's superhero magnum opuses. But the characters are still endearing and it must have been quite exciting to see your favorite comic book hero on the big screen for those young audiences. More of a budget would have helped a lot, too. I wish I had a lot of those tie-ups for my collection. 

ComicRack and YacReader version: Download Atom Man vs Superman pressbook

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I Have Asked to Be Where No Storms Come by Gwendolyn N. Nix Book Review

My review for I Have Asked to Be Where No Storms Come first appeared in The Horror Zine. It is reposted here with permission.

Sometimes words can get in the way of what an author and editor believe they are placing on the page. So much so that, by the time the novel is finished, you have a highly creative story that is confusing on first reading for anyone but the author and editor. With muddled elements in its framework of figurative joists, and a world-building nomenclature and landscape not putting out enough cogent information to keep the reader’s head above the tale being spun instead of getting mired, it becomes a challenging and bewildering endeavor.

Such is the case with I Have Asked to Be Where No Storms Come, an ambitious novel that melds dark fantasy, alternative history, and weird western fiction, three rich areas for imagination and drama, into a dense reading filled with flashbacks, here and there and now and then scene changes, and dialog heavy chapters alternating the experiences of two special but cursed brothers. All this is made denser by spiritually glossy words combined into metaphysically heavy sentences, replacing direct descriptions with concept-art word-pieces reaching for deep meanings but less clarity. Too much of a good thing is one way to describe this effort.

The head-scratching begins with trying to pin down the “when” of this narrative. A clue is given with how both Domino and Wicasah, two brothers of the Western Plains, from a family of witches, are, briefly, fossil hunters for hire. That would seem to place the time-period around 1877, a boon time for paleontologists in the old west after discoveries that led to dinosaur quarries producing tons of bones. But that does not sit right with other elements in the story that bounce automobiles in with the wagons, and Domino driving a cool muscle car in Hell. Another bone to pick, aside from time, is how Gwendolyn N. Nix pulls from various mythologies and cultures to weave her alternate world and its realms as if she has lots of interests and, sure, why not add it all into this one story. The result is an everything but the kitchen sink aesthetic that is confusing.

It all opens with Domino in Hell, though it is later called Helia, as he sits pondering a cell phone, mystified by it. No foreshadowing here, it is soon dropped. Helia is finally explained later in the novel, although a little too late in Nix’s fluid 5-part plotting structure. In Greek mythology, Helia is a sun goddess. In Nix’s mythology, it is a place. This makes the explanation for it, which is the driving force of the story, important. Instead of being a carefully placed revelation to generate welcomed acknowledgement that the prime reason for everything happening is now revealed, it produces an oh finally instead. Nix continues to provide essential explanations in this way toward the latter part of the novel, for key plot elements introduced at the beginning, as if she were working them out as she wrote. These explanations come through lengthy dialogs well after readers may be wondering about all the esoterica casually tossed their way.

The many elements that Nix draws on give the effect of being add-ons instead of organic elements growing with the story. Instead of a carefully structured unfolding, they appear again and again like a collage of ideas instead of a careful seeding to build the emotional pull with the people inhabiting her bizarre landscape. This landscape is broken in two by the Dark and Bloody, an eco-apocalypse thematic tied to Helia and all the bad reasons Domino and Wicasah, are fighting to survive.

Much exposition is devoted to family turmoil with and between Domino, Wicasah, their witch relatives, and significant others, taking up a large portion of the novel; there is the other turmoil of demons, dead souls, witches’ blood, and witches and god-like beings playing with thunder and worlds. Both eventually coalesce, but the drawn-out nature of the family turmoil dilutes the other. Both are never fully given a history: only those reasons directly related to the plot. Why does Domino and Wicasah’s father hate their mother and all witches? Where did all the witches come from in the first place and why is it a thing? Where did Domino and Wicasah’s tremendous powers come from and why are they so important to others seeking to entrap them?

With all these elements vying for the reader’s understanding, not enough basic wording is given to flesh them out fully or pace them within their importance. It is here where Nix’s stream of spiritual style dulls the pragmatic needs of the underlying actions. Her descriptions are concept-flights that need be re-read, often, to fully grasp what is going on and why.

Lots happens to the people and creatures in Helia and on earth, but their actions and reactions go by like watching a landscape from a moving train. Why Domino and other dead souls wind up in Helia is wonderfully imaginative. Witches and their hungry familiars (Domino’s familiars like to eat bones and do not mind chewing on his now and then); unhappy demons (because of all the annoying dead humans who like to sniff demon bone dust); psychopomps (from Greek mythology, guides for the dead) like the lady-slippers queen and Anxius; nuckelavees (from Orcadian mythology, a man-horse demon); a determined heyoka wielding lightning and a bad disposition (in Sioux culture, a sacred clown)--all swirl together as Domino battles to save his brother from a dangerous father who hates witches, and as Wicasah battles to save his brother from a dangerous battle between witches and gods and demons and dead souls in Helia.

There is a better novel buried in the archeological dig of this one. If you are one for reading word-tripping esoterica and new age spinning fiction, this novel may be well worth your while. There is also enough going on here that a carefully adapted screenplay could capture for Netflix or another streamer for those of us looking for more straightforward storytelling. It would not be surprising at all if that happened.

For Monsters Only Issue 4 (1966)

ZC reader Justin noticed I hadn't posted Cracked's For Monsters Only, issue 4. Well, here you go, Justin. I found a toasty but cozy copy in the closet. I miss the days of hunting for monster mags on the newstands. I'm sure you do, too. Enjoy.

ComicRack version: Download For Monsters Only Issue 4

See more toasty but cozy monster and pop culture magazines in Zombos' magazine morgue. 

Oops Dept. Update: I left out 6 pages from the original posting. They are now included.