Mexican Lobby Card: Reptilicus
Before trolls started roaming Norway in TrollHunter, Reptilicus was chomping on Denmark. Although this giant behemoth looks more like a Chinese dragon in the illustration than a reptile.
Mexican Lobby Card: Brain of Blood
The determination on the doctor’s face, the weird device he’s holding shooting out an energy beam, the savage determination on the ghoul’s face, and its strategic grappling around a bosomy chest; what more can you ask for in a lurid Mexican lobby card for Brain of Blood?
The 4 Stages of Your Writing Career
By Scott M. Baker
There’s an old joke that states an author has four stages in his or her career. There’s the first stage when a reader walks into a bookstore, lifts your book off of the shelf and asks, “Who the hell is Scott M. Baker?”
There’s the second stage when a reader walks into the bookstore and asks the sales clerk, “Do you have the latest book by Scott M. Baker?”
There’s the third stage when a reader walks into the bookstore and asks the sales clerk, “Do you have any books by authors who write like Scott M. Baker used to?”
And finally the fourth stage when a reader walks into a bookstore, lifts your book off of the shelf and asks, “Who the hell is Scott M. Baker?”
For anyone who has been published, there’s too little humor and too much reality in that joke.
Every author has to endure that first stage. Even Stephen King and J. K. Rowling were unknown entities at one time, at least until readers became aware at how incredibly adept they were at story telling. Now they’re household names. If only the rest of us were that lucky.
The sad truth, however, is that most authors will never make it beyond the first stage. If they’re really fortunate. If they’re good at telling a story, or developing great characters, or writing catchy dialogue. If they’re lucky enough to find a publisher who will distribute their books nationally. If the day their book comes out they’re not competing with an instant bestseller such as a kiss-and-tell book from one of Tiger Wood’s mistresses, or the latest Dan Brown tome, or a diet plan on how to lose weight by eating red velvet cheese cake, or the biography of a pet the cover of which is adorned with an incredibly cute ball of fur. And if, over time, they are fortunate enough to develop a small, loyal cabal of readers who will follow them regularly and read everything they write, then an author might pull in enough money annually to make ends meet (as long as they have an understanding spouse with a really good day job).
Depressed yet?
If you said no, then you truly are a writer. Not necessarily a good writer. Or a prolific writer. Or a rich and famous writer. But a writer, nonetheless. Someone consumed by the hunger of putting words to paper. Someone who can listen to a quirky story on the news or spot a unique looking individual on the street, and within an hour have the plot of a story or novel mentally outlined. Someone who brings their laptop on vacation because you can’t relax and enjoy yourself if you haven’t written something that day. For us, the writing is the passion, and seeing a complete story or novel in print is reward enough (though none of us will shut the door on fame and fortune if it comes knocking).
For those of you following me, you know that I have entered that dreaded first stage of the writer’s career. The first two books of my vampire trilogy are in print, with the third scheduled for publication this October. My first zombie novel should be out in 2012. Now I have to come to grips with the reality that writing the first novel and getting it published was the easy part. There will be plenty of work in the months ahead to market myself and attract readers, with the goal of reaching stage two. It’s going to be a long road, with no guarantee I’ll reach my goal.
For those of you who are just starting your writing career, over the next few weeks I’ll be offering some words of advice on how to get that first novel written and published. Will it guarantee you success as a writer? No. Will it be depressing yet irreverent? Yes on both counts. My goal is hopefully to encourage beginning authors to pursue their passion and to let you know you are not alone.
So get your notebooks ready.
About Scott M. Baker
Born and raised outside of Boston, Massachusetts, I’m a horror/urban fantasy author who now lives in northern Virginia. I’ve authored several short stories, including “Rednecks Shouldn’t Play with Dead Things” (which appeared in the autumn 2008 edition of the e-zine Necrotic Tissue); “Cruise of the Living Dead” (which appeared in Living Dead Press’ Dead Worlds: Volume 3 anthology); “Deck the Malls with Bowels of Holly” (which appeared in Living Dead Press‘ Christmas Is Dead anthology); “Denizens” (which appeared in Living Dead Press’ The Book of Horror anthology); and the e-chapbook “Dead Water” by D’Ink Well Publications.
My most recent works include The Vampire Hunters trilogy, which is being published both in electronic format (by Shadowfire Press) and print (by Pill Hill Press). Recently, I signed a contract with Permuted Press to publish in 2012 my first zombie novel, Rotter World, which details the struggle between humans and vampires during a zombie apocalypse. And I’m finishing up my fifth novel, which will be a homage to the monster movies of the 1950s set in northern New Mexico.
Please visit my website at http:\\scottmbakerauthor.blogspot.com.
TrollHunter (2010) Troll-ble With Giants
Zombos Says: Very Good
I had two questions in mind after watching Andre Ovredal’s TrollHunter: Why does Hans (Otto Jespersen) work alone, and why can’t American Horror movies take off-the-wall risks like this small budget Norwegian movie more often?
Hans is the laconic troll hunter followed by three students from Volda College. They’re filming a documentary about bear poaching and he’s pointed out by the local hunters who suspect him because he’s a stranger. He tells them to go away, but they persist and follow him at night, deep into the woods. Thomas (Glenn Erland Tosterud), the leader of the trio, makes a joke about meeting inbred pig farmers (but this is not a French Horror movie, so he needn’t worry).
Now comes the refreshingly audacious part: flashes of light and strange roars in the distance, followed by Hans running past them yelling “Troll!” I’m thinking this is going to be silly and it is, terrifyingly so. The troll crashes through the trees he nearly towers over and hunts them. All of the trolls in this movie are big or bigger, slow moving, and look like Jim Henson’s furry Muppets, but uglier and nastier than you’d find on Sesame Street. They are also quick to kill in this mockumentary, especially if they smell Christian blood. Hans isn’t sure about a Muslim’s blood when asked if the trolls hate it, too.
Hans uses UV light to turn the three-headed troll chasing them to stone. Later, the veterinarian he works with explains the biological factors behind that for us, but UV light either makes them explode if they’re young, or turns them into concrete if they’re old. Seriously. It’s this droll seriousness that keeps TrollHunter’s humor from trumping it’s chills, which come each time we meet different trolls, each getting bigger as we do. Telling Thomas, Kalle (Tomas Alf Larsen) the cameraman, and Johanna (Johanna Morck)—who holds onto a boom microphone—that he “doesn’t get a night bonus,” Hans finally agrees to let them follow him as he hunts trolls for the Troll Security Service. The TSS, using bear attacks as a cover, is not happy Hans let the secret out.
The funniest images happen when the veterinarian tells Hans she needs a blood sample. The needle he uses is a tad smaller than the one they used in the Amazing Colossal Man, but it’s still big enough to be a clown’s prop. Dressing in what looks like a suit of armor with a big red button on his chest, he carries a bucket filled with a “Christian man’s blood” to attract a troll living under a bridge. There’s a terminal amount of blood in that bucket so I wonder how he got it. After getting chomped on, slammed, and dunked by the annoyed troll, Hans warns Thomas not to touch the button as Thomas helps him up.
Given the this-is-film-footage-found-after-the-fact style of this movie, with the now standard night-vision scenery and budgeted special-effects viewing angles further obscured by shaky-cam, the story hangs onto its Blair Witch quality of suspenseful immediacy at the cost of details, especially when that footage ends abruptly.
Even so, the American remake is already around the corner. We’re always good at taking safe risks after others take the more riskier ones.
Book Review: Dog Blood
Zombos Says: Very Good
This conflict wasn’t faction versus faction or army against army; it was individual versus individual, more than six billion armies of one. Beyond that, the Hate didn’t care who you were, where you were, or what you were. You were simply on one side or the other, your position in this new, twisted, f**ked-up world decided without your involvement by unknown variables and fate.
The beauty of David Moody’s Dog Blood is how you can read so much or so little into it. Pile on the metaphors of your choice and pontificate away, or ignore them and become mired in a broken world crumbling down around broken lives. This downward spiral of hopelessness, of collapsing societies, of forlorn, shock-weary masses of people crushing in on themselves, and of mindless hatred leading to endless killing is depressing, frightening, and shamefully engrossing.
Picking up the apocalyptic speed from Hater, his first book in this it’s-them-or-us trilogy, the Unchanged are struggling against shattered selves and the Haters, those aggression-infected individuals who hunt and kill anyone not like them; family members kill family members, strangers kill strangers, friends kill friends, grinding them into bloody pulp in the process. As in any good horror play, the Haters are more organized, more determined, and much more deadly than the Unchanged, who are herded into the cities and penned up by the military providing questionable protection while stripping away their humanity, and quelling any incursion of agression by mass obliteration of the infected area. Making a terrible situation worse are the Brutes, a new generation of Haters that are stronger, totally unreasoning, and never tire of killing. They’re like Saruman’s Uruk-hai in the Lord of the Rings.
Danny McCoyne, a Hater, has one goal: to find his five year old daughter, Ellis. He will stop at nothing to accomplish his goal because she is like him. We watch and follow him through his own voice, but this is no longer only about him. There are millions of others, on both sides, and Moody slices chapters between Danny’s search for his daughter and Danny’s Unchanged cousin, Mark–and his squalid existence–to open up the bigger situation all around both of them enough to slip it all neatly into a handbasket and kick it hard and fast down a steep slope leading straight to a hellish climax of destruction.
Mark is one of thousands of Unchanged, holding on with exasperation and desperation as food, water, shelter, and safety dwindle. Assigned a small hotel room by the military, he shares it with his pregnant wife, her overwhelmed-to-shutdown parents who can’t get out of bed, and someone else hiding in the locked bathroom. Mark tries to keep it all under control but failure is imminent when another person, a loudly complaining stranger, is dumped in the room with them, by the military, in spite of his protests.
As Mark deals with escalating frustration and worries over his unborn child, Danny fumes at being delayed from finding Ellis by an organized group of Haters who have a secret plan for killing every Unchanged man, woman, and child, and by the bipartisan-thinking Mallon, a man who forces Danny to control his hate enough to keep him from bashing heads in at every opportunity. Their combined effect on Danny make him question the ultimate purpose of everyone involved, including his own.
Moody piles up the rotting bodies in every nook and cranny without remorse or compassion because heroics and sanity play no part in this shattered world. His paragraphs are long but concise and filled with small details to describe much, like the ubiquitousness of the dead when Danny realizes he’s stepping on a corpse only by the crunching sound of its brittle fingers he’s grinding underfoot.
Even now I can hear those metaphors rustling furtively in your brain and similes kicking up gray dust. Just remember it’s only a novel, though it would be best if you read it on the beach during a bright summer day.
Dementia 13 (1963) Pressbook
The movie gimmick here is the D-13! Test, a questionaire theaters could hand out to "…screen out those persons who may be adversely affected by this picture." Question 12 is the one I'd pay particular attention to: "The most effective way of settling a dispute is with one quick stroke of the axe to your adversary's head?" I'd answer yes to that one. How about you?
…
Comic Book Review: The Search for Swamp Thing 1
Zombos Says: Very Good
John Constantine smokes up a storm in the first of 3 issues for The Search for Swamp Thing. With only 20 pages to involve Batman and Zatanna, Jonathan Vankin and Marco Castiello keep Constantine moving before he can suffer from jet lag.
After the Swamp Thing sends a vibe to Constantine by way of the bloke's morning paper (try doing that on an iPad), it's a quick hop and half a pack to the Royal Botanic Gardens to commune more closely with "old lettuce-breath." The greenery takes Constantine's breath away instead, and leaves him with a spreading fungus tatoo for old time sake.
Lazy sot that he is, Constantine hooks up with Batman to do his legwork while a mobster impaled on a tree limb in a Gotham City junkyard may hold more clues as to what's making Daddy Iceburg Lettuce so petulant. In a tender moment of holding hands and frolicking in The Green's etherealness to commune with Swampy, Constantine winds up a few butts short and with a headache only Zatanna can make worse, what with their romance magic all zapped out and all, even with all that cleavage a-burgeoning (it's discretely shirted up for the issue's cover).
The art and story make Constantine a walking chimney of twitty droll wit armed with handy pocket magic spells, and keep this glummy mystery moving along briskly to the capper splash page lead-in for issue 2.
I just hope he can solve it before he finds out how much cigarettes cost here in the States and the page count drops again.
Meet the Author: Paul Bibeau
Paul Bibeau’s Sunday’s With Vlad is a monsterkid’s dream journey, a wild carnival ride, and a sheer delight as Jeffrey Lyons would say. Spend a Sunday or two with Paul and Vlad, or while away a weekday at his Goblin Books blog, or meet him right now…in his own words…near a dark desk.
Let me tell you about the dead men hidden in my office.
Twenty years ago when I was a recent graduate from college I took a job as a reporter for a small town newspaper. I lived over the bingo hall of the local Catholic church, I smoked a pack a day of Camels unfiltered, and when the night came over that place and it turned a rich country dark…I went out walking. I talked to vagrants, drug dealers, and cops. I snagged a dinner invitation from a man who’d turned his property into some kind of paramilitary fortress, like he was ready for an attack. The local criminals threatened me because they thought I was an undercover cop. And the real undercover cop, standing nearby and wearing a wire, recorded it all. I saw things and did things I will never forget.
Ten years ago, when I was a magazine writer living in New York City, I took a trip back to the town, took notes, and began writing a novel about my experiences. It was filled with death and crime and sexual perversion, and the sharp-sweet and terrible smell of that paper mill that dominated the whole region. I hated it and I miss it. The novel took three years of my life and went through four drafts. It was a piece of crap.
Seriously. My best friend took me out for drinks and told me how bad it was as gently as he could. I still have some of the rejection letters from agents — there were more than a hundred. The novel had great parts, but they didn’t add up to a great novel. Someone once said you write a good novel twice and a bad novel over and over. That’s exactly right. I am a big proponent of rewriting and editing, but a novel has a window of time in which you can either make it right or fail forever. How many of our life’s moments are like that? How many perfect near-misses do you have?
Anyway, now I look at the thing and I see the 20 year-old man I once was, who lived in this world and let it break his heart… and the 30 year-old man who tried to write about it and couldn’t. Those men are gone. I can’t get them back.
But someday soon, I promise you, friendly reader…I will write the story of a 40 year-old with a stack of paper in a dark desk drawer. He has his secrets and his regrets, and he realizes to make this story right, he will have to solve the mystery at the heart of it — a murder, actually. But isn’t every failed story a bit like a murder? I will write it as boldly as I can, until the old authors come back to me and speak their secrets. I need to do it soon.
My time is running out.
Village of the Damned (1960) Pressbook
Village of the Damned (based on John Wyndham's The Midwich Cuckoos) is still an effectively unnerving sci fi movie: unknown aliens tinker with human DNA to produce offspring with telekinetic powers and super egos to match. In this pressbook for the movie, the children's peculiar eyes are emphasized, especially in the Exploitation section. And no, I didn't know that George Sanders was once a South American tobacco grower.
The Bat People (1974) Pressbook
I picked this pressbook up because of its layout: the black and brown cover is striking, the use of font style adds to the flapping wings horror, and this movie's posters scream cheesy bat people makeup shown maybe two-thirds of the way into the story. But perhaps I'm wrong? Maybe this is a fantastically scary vampire opus? Nah!
…
Comic Book Back Covers:
Munsters Cookie Jars
From The Munsters, No. 1, 1997, published by TV Comics! I would have preferred Lily Munster instead, but I like Grandpa, too. Now, if Eddie's doll Woof Woof was made into a cookie jar, I'd buy that in a heartbeat.
Super 8 (2011): The Gang’s All Here
Zombos Says: Very Good (but will seem very familiar)
The gang’s all here in J. J. Abrams’ Super 8. You’ll recognize them from The Goonies, The Monster Squad, E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial: there’s the fat kid waiting for his lean years; the geeky kid with needed gadgets (explosive ones this time); the love-struck kid dealing with loss; the cute, hip girl everyone likes more than she likes herself; and parents who stay in the background much of the time because this is not their story. What’s different is the monsterkid nostalgia you’ll experience if you’ve ever held an 8mm camera to film backyard horror movies, or dry-brushed Aurora model kits with Testors paints, or just wore dark paisley shirts with big collars, sported mutton chops, and listened to music cassette tapes while cruising.
Charles (Riley Griffiths) is the fat kid who’s directing a zombie movie everyone’s got a part in. He’s secretly got a crush on the cute girl, Alice (Elle Fanning), so arranges for her to drive them to the train station late at night for a shoot. The Dick Smith’s Do-It-Yourself Monster Make-Up Handbook geeky kid, Joe (Joel Courtney), unknowingly mucks it up by falling for Alice, but he does fantastic zombie make-up so Charles can’t lose him. Watch the gang’s finished ‘movie’ during the end credits and you’ll see the same Dick Smithish zombie kid stumbling in different scenes, although he’s killed each time. Getting to the end credits is a Spielbergian adventure seen through Abrams’ eyes and the avocado greens and harvest golds of 1970s melange.
A mysterious late night train surprises the kids during taping, and when it’s driven off the rails, it surprises us. An almost endless shooting gallery of heavy train cars, twisting metal, flaming explosions, and mad dashes through it all flying through the air, thunking down too close, becomes absurd, outrageous, and awesome. The incendiary-prone geeky kid (Ryan Lee) eats it all up with relish. What comes out of one of the train cars is a multi-legged nightmare for the small town and a Hardy Boys mystery for the kids to solve. The adults get in the way without realizing it, but youthful resourcefulness pays off when the military takes over the investigation of the train derailment, and the hunt for the missing living cargo. Of course there’s the essential antagonistic-and-sadistic-career-military-guy-who’s-sinister-agenda-only-makes-things-worse running the investigation (Noah Emmerich).
Charles, taking a page from the Roger Corman school of filming, unperturbed, takes advantage of the army’s investigation and train derailment by including them in his taping. His investigator (Gabriel Basso) conducts an investigation while the military conducts theirs in the backgrounds of his scenes.
The often hopped-up, long-haired, electronics store shlub Charles gives his 8mm film to have developed provides necessary ground transportation in exchange for a date with Charles’ hot sister as the hunt picks up speed for the monster, the really pissed-off something kidnapping townspeople, wrecking property, and driving all the dogs away. It’s unhappy and angry from being locked up for years. Coincidentally, Joe is unhappy and angry because his mom was killed at the steel mill and his dad ignores him. And Joe’s dad is unhappy and angry at Alice’s dad, who was supposed to be working that shift where she died instead. And Alice is unhappy and angry with her dad because he can’t get over his guilt, either, or the loss of her mom. Her dad’s a long haired shlub, too, but he has his moments of redemption. And redemption comes for everyone when it’s needed the most.
Super 8 isn’t a coming of age movie. It’s not really meant to be a nostalgic mind trip, either, though some of us will be reminded of nostalgic things and yearn for them again. It’s even not a Spielberg adventure, but the camera movements and your emotions will remind you of what those adventures were like, except Super 8‘s more up to date in its nostalgic hipness.
It knows what we miss and gives it back for a little while.