Category: horror

Ruby Red Dress (Leave Me Alone)

Twelve days left to Halloween.

I’ve talked about Dark Shadows already, and I’ve also talked about soap operas before. But a lot of what we see now on television is technically serials; most series now are serials, where the action of each episode is picked up from where it left off in the previous one; continuity is important; and what happens in each episode has a causal effect on the characters for many episodes (and seasons) to come. I can remember, while True Blood was airing, and I was describing it to a friend who didn’t watch…and finally, I said, “It’s kind of like Dark Shadows with nudity, sex, and a lot of blood.” (I intend to talk about True Blood before Halloween, but this is not the entry.) It was kind of true, and I intend to draw those comparisons when I talk about True Blood –but today I am going to talk about another serial television show involving the supernatural (I don’t know that I can call it, fairly, horror) that Paul and I enjoyed watching: Dante’s Cove.

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I probably would have never known about Dante’s Cove if I hadn’t been working as an editor for Harrington Park Press at the time. Here TV was doing those adaptations of the Richard Stevenson/Don Strachey novels, and were also developing a series called <I>Dante’s Cove</i>. HPP was bringing the Strachey books back into print with tie-in editions, and Here was interested in having Dante’s Cove be novelized with tie-in editions. I thought it sounded interesting (it was pitched to us as “gay Dark Shadows“), and was interested in doing the novelizations myself, so Here sent me the pilot and the first season on DVD to watch.

The story was, actually, rather similar to the Dark Shadows opening: a young person comes to Dante’s Cove/Collinwood at the same time as a centuries old supernatural creature arrives, released from being imprisoned apparently for all time. Dark Shadows had Victoria Winters and Barnabas Collins the vampire; Dante’s Cove had Kevin and Ambrosius “Bro” Vallin. While Barnabas spurned the love of the witch Angelique, who cursed him and turned him into a vampire, leading his family to chain him up in his coffin; Ambrosius was a practitioner of magic called Tresum, and was engaged to a high priestess of the religion, Grace Neville. Grace caught Ambrosius literally being fucked in the ass by another man, whom she killed with magic, and she, too, cast a spell that locked him up for all eternity. Except Kevin, who comes to Dante’s Cove after being thrown out by his homophobic family to be with his lover Toby, unknowingly releases Ambrosius from his prison–which also triggers Grace to return.

Grace was played by Tracy Scoggins, best known for playing Monica Colby on first The Colbys, and then later on Dynasty.

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There were various characters, lesbians, gay men, straight boys, and varying storylines. Toby, the male lead, was played by Charlie David.

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Kevin was played by Gregory Michael, who also later turned up on the show Greek.

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Arrow’s Stephen Amell was in the first season as an asshole straight boy who was recast in Season 2.

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There was lots of male nudity–including full frontal–and the men always looked like they were covered in oil. Reichen Leimkuhl, who won The Amazing Race and was later on the terrible rip-off of Real Housewives type shows The A List–New York, joined the cast in Season 3. And Thea Gill from Queer as Folk, also joined in Season 2 as Grace’s sister and mortal enemy, Diana.

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Like I said, lots of pretty shirtless men, bare male asses, and the occasional male full frontal.

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The primary problem with Dante’s Cove, I felt, was bad writing and bad directing, as well as some serious continuity problems. The actors did their best with what they were given, but they just weren’t given enough, and it seemed like it was trying to be too serious. But a supernatural-themed soap opera with gay and lesbian characters that could get away with nudity shouldn’t have taken itself quite so seriously; it should have gone for humor and camp, and I bet it would have really caught on. (As I’ve said about other shows, “it wants to be Tennessee Williams when it should be going for Melrose Place.”) We were entertained, and we enjoyed watching it, but there was always such a sense of what it could have been. In the third season, the show went more along a campy route, giving the characters great bitchy quips, and it looked liked it had found its way…but alas, it wasn’t to be. It was cancelled. There was a spin-off show about a lair of vampires who lived in a sex club called The Lair that was also fun, and looked like it was hitting its stride at the end of its first season…but there wasn’t a second season, alas.

The novelizations, alas, never happened, which was also incredibly disappointing. I really thought I could make it a lot of fun…but alas, it is another one of those ‘wasn’t meant to be’ things.’

It would be kind of fun to rewatch…

And now back to the spice mines.

The Night The Lights Went Out in Georgia

As a Southerner, born and bred, I used to take great offense to sweeping over-generalizations about the South and people from the region; that everyone from down here is stupid, racist, ignorant, inbred, illiterate, toothless, etc. No region or state in this country has cornered the market on those things, nor has any state or region cornered the market on intelligence, education, intellect, liberalism, art or literature. Now, when I see such sweeping generalizations, I just chuckle to myself a bit and shake my head; as it actually says more about the person making the statement than the region being defamed.

I’m from the South, as I said, and I am not ashamed of that. We have a lot of problems down here, there’s no denying that, but I love the South in spite of its problems. Some of the most beautiful and poetic and lyrical writing I’ve done has been about the South; most of it being in short stories, many of which have never seen print. One day I will write about a novel about Alabama, the part of the state that I’m from; and I have some really terrific memories about the summers I spent there in my childhood.

I cannot spend the month of October writing about horror and not mention Douglas Clegg. I met Doug at Stoker Weekend on Long Island in I think 2010; I may not have that date right–I am very foggy on years and dating now that I am closer to sixty than fifty. I was aware of him, of course, before I met him; I’d been wanting to read his Arthurian novel Mordred Bastard Son for years. I bought a copy of one of his books to have him sign it, and I read it on my flight home.

It was Neverland, originally published in 1991.

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No Grown-ups

Among other words we wrote across the walls—some in chalk, some with spray paint—these two words were what my cousin Sumter believed in most.

There were other words.

Some of them were written in blood.

No child alive has a choice as to where he or she will go in the summer. After Grampa Lee died, our parents would drag us back every August to that small, as yet undeveloped peninsula off the coast of Georgia, mistakenly called an island.

Gull Island.

We would arrive just as its few summer residents were leaving. No one in their right mind ever vacationed off that section of the Georgia coastline after August first, and Gull Island may have been the worst of any vacation spots along the ocean. Giant black flies would invade the shore, while jellyfish spread out across the dull brown beaches like a new coat of wax. It was not (as sarcastic Nonie would remark) “the armpit of the universe,” but often smelled like it.

The Jackson family could afford no better.

Neverland is gorgeously written, and pretty damned scary at the same time.

From the very beginning, I was caught up in the brilliance of this book. The opening, in which the main character’s family is trapped in the car driving to a family vacation they are spending visiting relatives in Georgia, resonated with me–as every summer I was in the exact same situation heading to Alabama from Chicago. I remember the gas stations and the chocolate Yoo-hoos, buying the state maps, sitting in the backseat of the car with the “don’t cross” lines of demarcation between my sister and myself, and the forlorn wishing that we could take a family vacation doing something fun rather than visiting relatives.

And I was completely transported back to my own childhood.

The book is riveting, frankly–so gorgeously written and involving that it can’t be put down. I read it while I sat waiting to board my flight, all the way to Chicago, and finished it about halfway to New Orleans–and was sorry that it was over.

Is there anything quite like losing yourself in the grips of a master story-teller?

I’ve also read his chilling You Come When I Call You, and the truly great news here is that there is an enormous backlist to get lost in.

And now, back to the spice mines.

Spiders and Snakes

The key to writing good horror is, of course, to write about what scares you. Usually, what scares you will scare other people, as many of us have fears in common. I, for example, have many fears: the dark, situation claustrophobia (crowded elevators, tight spaces), heights, spiders, snakes, the puncturing of skin with sharp objects. (Reading Gillian Flynn’s brilliant Sharp Objects was incredibly difficult for me. In the hands of a lesser writer I probably would have stopped long before the end.) There are also things that make me uncomfortable–the woods, the open sea (again, situational; but even though I will get in the ocean, I am never really comfortable; but I am more comfortable in the ocean than I am in lakes and rivers), flying–when listing my fears, I do realize how neurotic I sound.

Barbara Michaels, aka Elizabeth Peters, aka Dr. Barbara Mertz, wrote wonderfully creepy Gothic horror novels; her ability to set that creepy mood where weird things could happen and seem absolutely realistic was extraordinary. I always say that Ammie Come Home is one of my all time favorite ghost stories, but she wrote many others that were also most excellent.

Take, for example, The Crying Child.

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From the air, the island doesn’t look big enough to land a plane on. It’s a pretty sight, from above, calling to mind all sorts of poetic images–an agate, shining brown and green, flung down in folds of sea-blue satin; a blob of variegated Play-Doh, left in a basin of water by a forgetful child; an oval braided rug on a green glass floor.

Or a hand, in a brown-and-green mitten. The hand is clenched into a fist, with a thumblike promontory jutting out on one side. Across the broad end there is a range of hills that might be knuckles; at the other end, the land narrows down into a wrist-shaped peninsula. There are beaches there, like fur trim on the cuff of the mitten; the rest of the island is thick with foliage, somber green pines and fir trees for the most part. The house is surprisingly distinct from above. The lighter green of the lawns and the gray outline of roofs and chimneys stand out amid the darkness of the pines. The only other distinctive landmark is the cluster of buildings that make up the village, along the thumb promontory, and its harbor, which is formed by the junction of thumb and hand.

And that’s where the figure of speech fails. You could compare the house to an oddly shaped ring, up on the knuckles of the hand, but the village doesn’t suggest any analogy. A diseased imagination might think of sores or warts; but there was never anything festering about St. Ives. It was just a charming Maine town, and not even the events of that spring could make it anything else. There was no lurking horror in the village. It was in the house.

I certainly wasn’t aware of horrors that morning in May. I had worries, plenty of them, but they were comparatively simple ones. I didn’t know, then, how simple.

The story is quite simple. Joanne, our heroine, was raised by her older sister Mary after their parents died. Mary managed to land herself a millionaire husband, who tried to fill a father figure role for Joanne–which she didn’t appreciate or like. Long story short, the sisters became estranged when Joanne finished college and moved far away, refusing any further assistance from her wealthy brother-in-law and sister.*

*This is something I’ve never understood as a plot point; why would you refuse help from a wealthy, connected relative? This is often a plot device in melodramas/romances/soap operas, when someone marries into wealth. “I need to be my own man.” “I need to be my own woman.” I always roll my eyes; I understand it, but why make life harder on yourself than necessary?

Mary has always wanted a child of her own, and recently has suffered a miscarriage. Mary and her husband Ran are spending the summer on King’s Island, at his ancestral family home. He has wired Joanne that Mary needs her, and so of course, full of misgivings about her brother-in-law but worried about her sister, she gets on a plane and heads to Maine. After she lands, Ran–and the island doctor–tell her that Mary is having a breakdown; she keeps leaving the house at night because she claims she hears a baby crying and has to find it. The reason Ran finally sent for Joanne was because that night she almost went over a cliff.

Mary seems normal, but shortly after Joanne’s arrival, she sees a strange ghost in the family cemetery and stumbles over a grave just outside the consecrated ground…and then she, too, starts to hear the crying child.

This book is absolutely chilling, with constant twists and turns that keeps the reader on the edge of his/her seat, and that sense of unease, that Gothic atmosphere, keeps up through the entire book.

I loved the work of Barbara Michaels; still do, in fact. I also love her work as Elizabeth Peters. I’d love to revisit her novels–The Dark on the Other Side and Be Buried in the Rain in particular; I do reread Ammie Come Home fairly regularly.

And now, back to the spice mines.

Run, Joey, Run

Egypt. Land of the pharaohs, the bounty of the Nile. I’ve always loved, and been fascinated, by Egypt; I’m not sure why, or when it actually began, or what triggered it. It’s just always been. Maybe it’s a past-life thing, like my apparent fascination with Russian history and culture may have been (I was told be a psychic once that I’d lived as a Russian nobleman in a past life, eventually joining an Orthodox monastery after a long and fruitful life), if you believe in that sort of thing–I’m not sure that I do, and it’s not like I’ll ever know one way or another for sure.

But one thing that is true is that I’ve always been fascinated by Egypt; its history, its art, and its culture.

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Egypt was a mighty civilization and empire when our European ancestors were living in caves and trying to figure out how to start fires. No one is really certain how they were able to build the pyramids; there are theories, of course–I’ve always loved the Erich von Daniken theory that it was aliens (Chariots of the Gods?), which was later used in the movie Stargate, which I loved–and to this day, despite advances in archaeology and Egyptology and discoveries, we still don’t know a lot of about the ancient Egyptians.

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The burning of the Great Library of Alexandria during an Egyptian civil war during the time of Cleopatra VII (she is rarely given the number in modern times; we know her simply as Cleopatra), which had gathered all the knowledge of the ancient world, remains to me one of the greatest tragedies of history.

I’ve always dreamed of going to Egypt, to see the wonders there for myself. As I get older, the trips I’ve always longed for probably will never happen, but one day I do hope to get to the British Museum at the very least, to see the Egyptian treasures and artifacts there.

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So, what does Egypt have to do with horror month? Obviously, The Mummy.

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I saw the original film version of The Mummy as an afternoon movie after school; naturally, as a young Egyptophile how was I not going to watch it once I saw it in the television listings? I don’t remember the movie scaring me that much; I thought it was a great movie–but I never watched the sequels. In this movie, of course, some Egyptologists had found the tomb of Imhotep, who had been buried alive for some sacrilege, but became reanimated–the Scroll of Thoth had given him immortality (again, a similar plot device was used in The Cat Creature) and was now looking for the reincarnation of his great love Ankhesenamun (which was also the name of Tutankamen’s wife and queen; the tomb had only been discovered a mere eleven years earlier than when the film was made). It was clever, I thought, and you couldn’t help but feel a bit sorry for him.

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The 1999 film The Mummy used a lot of the same concepts as the 1933–Imhotep being brought back to life (this time by the Book of the Dead) and looking for his lost love Ankhesenamun–but this Imhotep was definitely a villain. The movie was also done as a period piece, with my crush Brendan Fraser in the lead as a kind of Indiana Jones-style adventurer. Both it, and its sequel, The Mummy Returns, were fun movies that I greatly enjoyed.

Mummies, and Egyptian antiquities, are often used for popular fiction; maybe sometime I should do an extensive study on this. My favorite Robin Cook novel is Sphinx ; I love Allen Drury’s Amarna novels A God Against the Gods and Return to Thebes; there’s the AMAZING Amelia Peabody series by the late always lamented Elizabeth Peters; the Hardy Boys themselves even had some Egyptian-related cases; Agatha Christie set Death Comes as the End in ancient Egypt and Death on the Nile in contemporary Egypt; The Three Investigators solved The Mystery of the Whispering Mummy; and Anne Rice also wrote Ramses the Damned, or The Mummy.

Hell, even Scooby Doo Where Are You? had an episode about a mummy.

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Anne Rice’s The Mummy was a book I greatly enjoyed; I intend to reread it soon.

I’ve always wanted to do an Egyptian book; I’ve always wanted to do a mummy style book.

Maybe someday.

I Think I Love You

The 1980’s were an interesting time. The decade is sort of a blur for me in some ways–there was a lot of pot smoking and alcohol abuse and of course, the cocaine issue–but I also had fun, or so it seemed at the time. I sometimes wonder, when I am given to reflect on the past (something I seem to be doing more and more as I age) how different my life would be had I not, in fact, been living a double life in my twenties. But of course, these are the sort of things that are immaterial ultimately; if any single one thing in my past had been different, my life as I know it now would be different, and I am enormously happy with my present life. And I do remember that period of my life fondly; I remember going, many times, into a marijuana induced coma with friends while we watched endless hours of MTV, back when it used to actually show music videos.

Another popular show that we watched through the smoke was a syndicated series called Friday the 13th–the Series.

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Every episode of the show began with a voice over:

“Lewis Vendredi made a deal with the devil to sell cursed antiques. But he broke the pact, and it cost him his soul. Now, his niece Micki, and her cousin Ryan have inherited the store… and with it, the curse. Now they must get everything back, and the real terror begins.” 

Part of the problem, you see, was originally Micki and Ryan decided not to keep the store and had a big sale to get rid of everything inside. Then Jack Marshak, an expert in the occult, showed up and told them about Uncle Lewis’ deal with the devil and that every item in the store was cursed. In the first episode, they didn’t believe him, of course, until they started tracking down one of the items. Each cursed item had some kind of power related to what it was; a Cupid had the ability to make anyone fall in love with the person who owned it, for example. The problem was the blood curse on every item–in exchange for the use of the item’s power, the person using it had to kill someone, or the item itself would kill someone. The show followed the three–Jack, Micki, and Ryan–as they tried to track down each item.

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The reason I even discovered the show in the first place was because one of my friends thought Robey, the actress who played Micki, was hot.

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She almost always wore white cotton tank tops without a bra, in typical 80’s exploitation.

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She also had a bad case of serious 80’s hair.

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But it was a clever idea for an anthology/horror/supernatural style series, and it last three seasons. I kind of got sucked into it, and still remember it fondly. It was syndicated, so it was much lower budget than it would have been had it aired on a network. It was available for streaming on Amazon Prime recently, and the last time I was doing cardio I was rewatching….alas, for my month of horror, it’s no longer available. Rewatching made me realize just how low budget the show actually was; but it would be a great thing to reboot for the modern audience.

And now, back to the spice mines.

Muskrat Love

One of the more interesting things in Stephen King’s Danse Macabre was his dissection of the common core at the root of all horror stories; the conflict between between the Apollonian and the Dionysian worlds; in that all horror stories begin in an Apollonian (or seemingly Apollonian) world where everything makes sense, everyone is just going about their business, and into that world something Dionysian is introduced, and the conflict, the point of the story, is to vanquish the Dionysian and return everything to the Apollonian; he further used Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson as an illustrative example of the two sides; in which Dr. Jekyll is a man of the intellect, of reason, while Mr. Hyde is all pure emotion, sensuality, and chaotic action.

I’m probably explaining it badly (I am no King, after all), but it really does work thematically as you look at most horror (it doesn’t fit all horror stories, of course; nothing can possibly and simply explain an entire genre). It also kind of explains why I am not such a good horror writer; I am not well enough versed in the genre–fiction and non-fiction–to write it credibly. I mean, isn’t that why I devote so much of my reading time to crime fiction? To make me a better crime fiction writer?

Sigh. Yes, I do have a rather strong grasp of the obvious.

Yet, my own Sara certainly fits that description. Everyone at the school is going along, living their lives, and then Sara shows up; bad things happen, and then the problem is solved and they can go back to living their lives, if a little shell shocked.

Rereading Danse Macabre, I also realized that many of my horror stories–most of them, if not all of them, actually–subscribe to the ethos of what King called “the EC Comics mindset.” EC Comics were long gone by the time I was a kid, but I did read the DC comic versions, House of Mystery and House of Secrets.

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There were usually two or three stories in each issue, and like the old EC Comics–the Tales from the Crypt style–there was a narrator of sorts, a curator of the House of Secrets or the House of Mystery–who would introduce each tale. It was either a horror/supernatural story, or some kind of noirish story where the main character was going to do something criminal or bad, and got their just desserts in the end.

As King says, the “heh heh” ending.

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King himself does this in a lot of his own short stories, but being a better writer and more creative, he can make it work.

The short story that I finally finished last night is sort of like that, only it’s noir, not horror. I need to revise it–i will do that today, and spend the weekend revising some other stories I want to submit–but it’s interesting that I always try to go for the twist ending in my short stories.

Hey, at least I don’t do the “oh, it was all a dream” thing….anymore.

And now, back to the spice mines.

Billy Don’t Be a Hero

When I talked about Crowhaven Farm the other day I also mentioned how the ABC Movie of the Week used to occasionally foray into horror, and that some of those made-for-TV horror movies were actually quite good; everyone remembers the scary Trilogy of Terror with Karen Black; primarily for the part with the Zuni fetish doll. I can’t remember the other two stories in that anthology movie, but that part absolutely terrified me from beginning to end, and I still remember it vividly. There was another called Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark, with Kim Darby of True Grit fame, which was about little murderous monsters that lived in a house but couldn’t come out into the light. As someone with a lifelong fear of the dark, that one still haunts my dreams.

Constant Reader knows I’m an Egyptophile; have been since I was a little boy. So, today, I am going to talk about one of those movies that had a basis in Egyptian mythology and history; I barely remember anything about it, to be honest, but it was quite terrifying.

It was called The Cat Creature.

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The premise of the movie is that a very wealthy, eccentric man who liked to collect things has died. Someone is sent out to his house to catalogue and valuate his things. Down in the basement in a room are a bunch of things that no one knew he had–Egyptian antiquities, including a mummy with a big solid gold amulet around its neck. A thief has also broken into the house, and when the other guy is distracted, steals the amulet from the mummy. Then something kills the first guy, while the thief runs away with the amulet. Lots more deaths follow, including eventually the original thief–and it appears that the amulet is a lot more important than anyone thinks. An archaeology professor is brought it to consult with the police, because of the Egyptian thing, and it also appears like all of the victims were killed by an animal–a cat, specifically, and all through the movie there are cats acting strangely all the time. Meredith Baxter Birney shows up as a new girl in town, gets a job at the pawnshop where the amulet wound up, and to serve as a love interest for the archaeology professor.

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Turns out the mummy belonged to a priestess of the Egyptian goddess Bast, and the amulet has magic properties–keeping the priestess, who has eternal life, trapped in the mummy. When the thief took the amulet, the mummy came back to life–and of course, as a priestess of Bast has the ability to turn herself into a cat. She is trying to destroy the amulet, so of course she can never be trapped again.

Meredith Baxter Birney, of course, is the priestess, and when she tries to kill the archaeologist in the end, he quickly slips the amulet around the cat’s neck, turning her back into the priestess, then into the mummy again, and then her body turns to dust.

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Oscar winner Gale Sondergaard–I think she may have won the first Oscar for Best Supporting Actress; if not the first, one of the first–had a great supporting role as the pawnshop owner.

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It’s on youtube; sometime when I have time (HA!) I will watch it again. I also looked up some info on the movie just now–the plot is pretty much as I remember it, and the original story and screenplay was written by Robert Bloch!

I’ve always wanted to write a story about Egypt, and I have a y/a in the files I’ve been wanting to write for a while–revolving around a cult of Bast; and now I know where the inspiration came for it!

And now, back to the spice mines.

Joy to the World

It is highly ironic that, on National Coming Out Day, I was reminded of the existence of someone whom I hadn’t thought about in years; someone who, back in the days before my first novel came out was editor of a gay fiction publication (whose name is, in fact, lost in the mists of time). I remembered emailing him, when I was working for Lambda Book Report, to see if we could do a piece on the magazine, what he was looking for in terms of submissions and so forth–my vision of Lambda Book Report, was to make the magazine not only about reviewing books but also to provide resources and support for aspiring LGBTQ writers and publications (the way I described my vision was “an LGBTQ hybrid of Publishers Weekly and The Writer“). He emailed me back, having totally misread my email and its intent with the simple sentence, I’ve had to reject much better writers than you.

I didn’t bother responding; I never had trouble finding material or pieces to fill the magazine to waste my time explaining myself to such a rude piece of shit. And yes, I admit it, I was small enough of a person to enjoy the moment when I heard his publication folded, and when his own first book disappeared without a trace. I’d forgotten he even existed until this morning.

I suppose it’s small of me to even mention this today; but it’s also nice to be reminded, every once in a while, that my voyage to becoming a published writer wasn’t always as smooth as I remember. But I digress; it’s still October, it’s still my month to write about horror, rather than the horrors of being a writer–and I have decided, in honor of National Coming Out Day, to write about two books that showed me that there was the possibility of such a thing as gay horror: Steam by Jay B. Laws, and Queer Fear, an anthology edited by Michael Rowe.

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Queer Fear (and its sequel, aptly titled Queer Fear II) was a revelation to me. The stories (by authors like Douglas Clegg, Michael Thomas Ford, William J. Mann, Gemma Files, Caitlin R. Kiernan, and Nancy Kilpatrick, among many others) were extraordinary; great horror, terrific writing, and inspirational for me as a horror fan. I reviewed both editions for Lambda Book Report, and I still have my copies of both somewhere; I kind of want to dig them out and reread them again. Both were nominated for Lambda Literary Awards; the second won. It was when I found out there wouldn’t be a third (which I still think is criminal) that I decided to put together one of my own,Shadows of the Night.

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It’s been years since I read Steam, and I don’t know where my copy is; I know I still have it. Jay B. Laws only wrote two books before dying far too young from HIV/AIDS in the early 1990’s; he was an extraordinary writer. (I have a copy of the second, The Unfinished, but haven’t read it.) When I was senior editor at Harrington Park Press I wanted to reprint both books, but I was never able to uncover who owned the rights to them; Alyson had originally published them but they were long out of print, and of course, Laws was deceased.

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Steam was not only a great horror novel–terrifying, really–but it was also a powerful allegory about HIV/AIDS itself. In the story, there is a demonic presence in one of the bath houses in San Francisco, that is spreading and getting more powerful as it kills; and in order to save the men they love, some gay men have to go into the possessed bath house to kill the demon and close the portal to hell. It was an amazing, amazing read. I think I read it over the course of one day; I’ve always regretted the loss of Laws and the books he could have written.

In the LGBTQ ghetto of publishing; there have always been a lot of romance and mystery novels; but speculative fiction has never really been as represented as well as romance and mystery (the point can be made that romance and mystery are both much larger genres in the mainstream; and therefore the smaller percentage of queer speculative fiction novels corresponds to that as well), and I’ve always felt that there should be a lot more of them. Lethe Press is, as far as I know, the only press currently primarily focusing on LGBTQ speculative fiction; they are doing a great job, but I would love to see more.

And now, back to the spice mines.

Love Will Keep Us Together

Yesterday, since there wasn’t an LSU game to stress over, I simply did chores and idly watched (had the television on while I read or did chores) some games–Texas A&M vs. Tennessee; Alabama vs Arkansas, Florida State vs Miami–until we started watching some of our shows. I have to say, given what has been going on in the country over the last few years, and particularly since Friday; Friday night’s episode of  The Exorcist was especially powerful. What I really enjoyed about it was it showed how seductive evil can be…and the scene on the el, when Casey was basically being groped and assaulted by the drunk bro in front of everyone who watched and did nothing? Absolutely horrifying, and yes, while not wanting to provide spoilers, I had no sympathy for the dude bro.

Kind of how like in Carrie, I didn’t have much sympathy when the bullies started getting theirs.

But while I was watching football games yesterday, I was also rereading Danse Macabre by Stephen King. It’s really quite exceptional, even better than I remembered; it’s an examination of the horror genre from a personal perspective, but it’s incredibly smart. It could, quite seriously, be a text for a Genre Fiction class. It’s written in, as I mentioned, an incredibly accessible style, yet it also delves into serious scholarship and examination of the primary themes in the genre. It really, really is quite brilliant.

I overslept this morning, of course, as I am wont to do on Sundays, but the great thing about it is that I feel completely rested for the first time in days. I’ve already done the dishes, intend to clean up around here, and then I am going to write for a while. Then in the later afternoon, I am going to take my camera out into the neighborhood and take some pictures. There are some interesting changes going on down on Magazine Street.

Oh, yes, horror; I am supposed to be talking about horror, aren’t I?

When I was a kid, ABC used to made-for-TV movies and aired them on Tuesdays as the ABC Movie of the Week. Some of them were ‘important dramas’; like Go Ask Alice; some were bad comedies, some were mysteries, and some were horror. Many of them were quite terrible, but some of them were memorable; they often used film stars past their prime, and while I admit I’ve not seen any of them in years, the first one I remember–one that terrified the crap out of me–was Crowhaven Farm; which is on Youtube, and I have it on my watchlist, but haven’t gotten to it yet–partly because I fear it won’t hold up, and what scared a ten year old might seem silly to an adult.

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I don’t remember the entire plot, but it had to do with a city couple either inheriting or buying Crowhaven Farm, and moving out to the country because their marriage was struggling; partly because they hadn’t been able to conceive a child. Once they reach the farm, though, the wife–Wikipedia tells me her name was Maggie–starts remembering things about the farm that she couldn’t possibly know; she walks over to a wall and touches a secret latch that opens a panel to a secret room, for example. She starts having flashes of a past in Colonial times; and there are ghosts walking around Crowhaven Farm–that apparently have it in for her. They take in a foster child but then Maggie learns she is pregnant…and some of the memories have to do with her being ‘pressed’–a punishment where suspected witches were placed beneath a wooden panel and stones piled on it until she is crushed to death (it always seemed like an unpleasant way to die to me). Back in Colonial times, the area had it’s own Salem-like witch issues, and it turns out that Maggie, back then, escaped death by pressing by ratting out some other witches who now want to get even with her in THIS life.

The ending was especially scary to me.

I used to watch the movie every time it aired, because I enjoyed it so much…and I’ve never forgotten about it, either. It popped back into my memory when I remembered that Barbara Michaels’ superb ghost story Ammie Come Home had been made into a Movie of the Week called The House That Would Not Die, starring Barbara Stanwyck, and went looking for it. I found it on Youtube…which suggested Crowhaven Farm to me.

Good stuff.

I also hope to start reading Bracken MacLeod’s Stranded tonight.

And now back to the spice mines.

Midnight at the Oasis

Stephen King. What is there left to say about Stephen King? From the first moment I read Carrie, I was a fan. I’d read a lot before I discovered him; and yet his writing was a revelation to me. What he was able to do with setting, with character, the way he made his stories–regardless of subject matter–relentlessly realistic opened my eyes to what one can accomplish with writing. Over the years, as I’ve continued to read King (I still am not completely caught up; I am several books behind–the days when I could buy the book on release day and devour it in one or two sittings are sadly, far in the past), I continue to marvel at his extraordinary expertise. And while some of his books seem to go off the rails a bit, I would be proud to claim any of what I consider his lesser books (and by that I mean ‘ones I am not as fond of as others’) as my own: The Tommyknockers, Rose Madder, Dreamcatcher. I used to reread his books, over and over again–I don’t even know how many times I’ve reread salem’s Lot and The Stand and The Dead Zone and Christine, for example; and I wish I had the time to sit down and reread them all, from Carrie on. His On Writing is the one text I would tell every beginning writer to read from beginning to end, commit to memory, go back to whenever needed.

But I decided I wanted to talk about a different Stephen King title today: Danse Macabre.

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As I often point out, I am more of a fan of horror than anything else; I’ve not read as widely in the genre as I would like, nor do I even know enough about the genre to write about subgenres and subcategories expertly. There are any number of horror writers whose oeuvres I’ve stuck my toe into, and found the water just fine, but haven’t had the time to fully commit to reading: Christopher Golden, Gemma Files, Douglas Clegg, Brian Keene, Nick Cutter, and John Boyne, just off the top of my head, and there are many more. There is just so much time, after all, and there are just so damned many books; and as someone who is primarily defined professionally as a crime writer, I have to read so much within my own genre, not to mention true crime–and of course, I love my nonfiction, which I can just walk away from without too much worry of having to go back to the beginning to start over.

But I do feel that King’s Danse Macabre, published originally in 1981, is an excellent overview of the horror genre up until that date. King’s non-fiction writing is very similar to his fiction; it’s smart but also accessible. And it’s excellent; it is serious scholarship about the genre of horror, written by the grandest master of the grand masters, talking in an accessible way about the best books, the best writers, the best films, and the best television programs within the genre…how they influenced his own work, and why. It’s truly exceptional.

I’ve always had a copy of Danse Macabre–well, I’ve always had a copy of every Stephen King book in my house–and it’s been a long time since I’ve revisited it. I may, once I tire of rereading Antonia Fraser’s Mary Queen of Scots, give it another whirl. Reading it the first time was what reminded me of Richard Matheson, introduced me to other writers like Robert Bloch and Harlan Ellison (my God, Harlan Ellison) and even, for the first time, made me truly aware of Shirley Jackson; reading this was what sent me to the used bookstores in search of books by these authors again, and I’ve never regretted those forays into their work–Ellison and Jackson are certainly up there on my list of absolute favorites, and many of the others I originally found through reading Danse Macabre are certainly favorites.

And that’s not even including the television shows and movies.

And now, back to the spice mines.