Ian Fleming interviewing a drunk Raymond Chandler. Found via the great Greil Marcus.
Showing posts with label books. Show all posts
Showing posts with label books. Show all posts
Friday, July 2, 2021
Friday, April 2, 2021
Imagine the “Theme From Shaft” Here
If you’re like me, you probably have fantasized about a movie featuring a blaxploitation protagonist doing the good work of the psychic detective. I still can’t help you with the movie, but Edward M. Erdelac’s story collection “Conquer” (here’s a link to my local version of Amazon, you know how to use yours), concerning the adventures of the titular private eye with an eye for the weird, has you covered in book form.
Pleasantly, the stories don’t just coast by on the neat idea of “Shaft meets Carnacki” and Erdelac’s expert use of the pulp toolbox but do some fun conceptual work on its basic concept, adding some interesting ideas about how magic works in Conquer’s world, as well as demonstrating a fine eye for the interplay between the weird and the book’s 70’s setting.
With all its love for the period it is set in and inspired by, this is very much a book written in our time, so it does show a rather more inclusive and empathetic spirit than you might expect. Consequently, characters like the drag queens in one of the tales are treated much more dignified than you’d see in any blaxploitation flick. The book is, obviously, all the better for it.
Friday, January 29, 2021
Look out, it’s a book recommendation!
The much vaunted historical Sword & Sorcery/Cthulhu Mythos tales featuring Simon of Gitta by Richard L. Tierney have long been out of print in any affordable form, at least as far as I know.
In December, Pickman’s Press has quietly published a new compilation of the stories titled “Sorcery Against Caesar” in paperback as well as eBook format, filling quite a hole for someone of my interests. I haven’t read the book yet, so this really is just a notice for anyone reading this who also had this particular gap in their collection.
Have a handy link.
Sunday, August 9, 2009
There is only links!
ITEM! The philosophical journal has made its fourth volume downloadable as one of those fancy PDFs. If you can take a little jargon, go hither and read the words of people with names like Mieville, Ligotti and Houellebecq talk about horror. Swanky!
ITEM! In the world of the independent video game, Annie Carlson & Brian Mitsoda (both formerly of Obsidian) are doing their own thing now in the form of a zombie apocalypse survival RPG! Which certainly is a mouth full, and also quite exactly something I very much want to play right now. Exciting!
ITEM! Keeping with the video games, SPAG editor Jimmy Maher has graced us with a piece of IF (that's the fancy word for text adventure) based on a rather excellent Call of Cthulhu scenario. The King of Shreds and Patches features certain Elisabethan playwrights, Doctor John Dee, the plague and the King in Yellow, and while some of the puzzles are a little long-winded, the whole experience is quite wonderful (and free). It's also full of the thematic and narrative kinks most dear to my heart. Kinky!
ITEM! The great Caitlin R. Kiernan has a new book out, called The Red Tree. It is (that word again) excellent and takes everything I always loved about weird fiction and drags it into the 21st century. She has also stuffed her website full of enticing pieces of evidence regarding the titular tree. Machenesque!
ITEM! Another site full of free legal music downloads has reared its head in the form of gimmesound.com. Musicians get paid out of the site's ad revenue (some money also goes to charity), so it's recommended you keep your adblockers off for once, and enjoy stumbling upon new music. Musical!
Saturday, January 24, 2009
Jane Austen lovers rejoice! Jane Austen haters as well!
Now how could one improve the awesome work of art/terrible bore that is Pride & Prejudice?
If you are saying to yourself now: "Why, I'd add zombies, of course!", you are a person after my own heart. And fortunately, we are not alone.
A certain Seth Grahame-Smith did the good work of improving Pride & Prejudice to Pride & Prejudice & Zombies, an endeavor so glorious one can't help but link to the shop page (and wait impatiently until the book's release in April).
Via Cinema Suicide, where you'll also find a short but oh-so-sweet-as-in-"Braaaiiinss" excerpt.
Wednesday, January 21, 2009
Sunday, December 28, 2008
Help out some good people
Saturday, December 27, 2008
Book Report: Poppy Z. Brite, Drawing Blood
Young traumatized drifter and comics artist Trevor McGee returns to the house where his father had killed Trevor's mother and brother and then himself to finally get rid of the shadows of the past and find an answer to the question why his father did leave him alive.
There, in the small town of Missing Mile, he not only meets the very literal ghosts of his past, but also Zach, a hacker from New Orleans whose own traumata are nearly as bad as Trevor's. Obviously, they are going to fall in love.
Usually, I am not one of Brite's detractors, but Drawing Blood left me as cold as a book can. Besides some formal problems I have with it - especially a sub-plot in Zach's home of New Orleans that does not have a function in the book which could not have been filled more elegantly and less book-bloatingly in very different ways - the novel falls down flat for me in its core.
While reading, I was never able to believe Trevor and Zach as the traumatized and hurt people they were supposed to be; it felt mostly like Brite was going through the motions of oh-so-sexy pain and telling me how hurt her characters were, without ever writing about truly damaged people.
The patness of the ending did not much to change my mind about the characterization here either. I am sorry, but this is not the way pain works - actually, it's not even an effective romantization of pain.
Friday, December 19, 2008
Book Report: Robert Dunbar, The Pines
Years after the (completely natural and less than mysterious) death of her husband, Athena, a coloured, terribly unhappy woman from the city, still lives with her mentally handicapped and/or just plain strange son Matty in the ramshackle family home in the Jersey Pine Barrens she and her husband had planned on renovating. Athena has trouble relating to her son and spends most of her time away from him as a voluntary rescue helper for the barely operational local emergency service of her only friend Doris and with a rather sordid affair with corrupt cop Barry. If we can believe the book, the communities in the Barrens are something from Lovecraft's nightmares (well, those that weren't xenophobic): incestuous and degenerated to an unbelievable degree with a higher percentage of mental illnesses than you'll find in the average psychiatric clinic.
Also, people tend to disappear there more often than seems credible without sinister goings on deeper than the things Barry and the Sheriff Frank are up to.
Now, the disappearances turn into outright murders. People are mangled and ravaged by something the authorities (if you want to call them that) think is a roaming pack of dogs; something that seems to be closing in on Athena in a way no normal pack of animals would do. Even worse is that Matty seems to have some form of mental rapport with the monster that might just be the source for the legend of the Jersey Devil...
I had read quite a few good things about The Pines and was glad when Leisure Books announced their new mass market edition. Say what you will about Leisure (like, for example, that most of their original novels could really use another rewrite or just stronger editing), but they are doing their bit to keep some of the more marketable horror fiction of the past thirty years in print.
The novel itself is an interesting piece of work, flawed in many aspects, but successful enough in one single element that I can still recommend it heartily.
Most troubling for me are moments of nearly cringeworthy dialogue, especially the permanent (and just incredibly annoying) use of "dialect" - one of the major sins of dialogue writing committed by authors everywhere. If you are not a linguist, or really really good at what you do when trying to sound like "the local people" (who are for some reason always much less educated than yourself and so obviously must be stupid and have to sound that way, too), just don't.
The local people lead quite neatly to the book's next problem: characterization. Some of the core characters, like Athena or Barry's partner Steven, are well drawn, nuanced and believable, but as soon as we come to the "Pineys", Dunbar pulls out all stops to push us into the most cliched "degenerate villager" stereotypes imaginable. Combined with the language they use, these caricatures are sometimes hard to take and I have quite a bit of trouble not to think of the author having some rather problematic ideas about the mental capacities of uneducated people.
While it's hard not to sympathize with Dunbar's themes of redemption and emotionally closed up people opening up to life again, the plot he utilizes to explore them has its own problems. The core of the plot is strong, there is just a lack of control - many sub-plots just fade out without having gone anywhere, important ideas aren't explored enough, most of the murders would better be handled off-stage and the ending - as well as the way Athena has to act to set it up - isn't properly constructed at all. The explanation for Dunbar's version of the Jersey Devil is not original, yet fine enough, but it does in no emotionally or logically successful way lead to the ending the book has.
Now, having been less than enthusiastic about dialogue, plot and characters, why is it I still don't think the time reading The Pines is wasted? It's Dunbar's language when he's not writing dialogue or action. One seldom finds a book this evocative of a mood of dread, despair and the humid oppression of rot. The author paints a disturbing picture here of nature far from being a thing of beauty or romantically wild, but a thing of terror more deserving of fear than the thing that hides beneath the bed or in the cupboard. This element of the book is Lovecraftian in all the best meanings of the word and strong enough to keep the novel afloat through some very rocky moments.
Your mileage may vary, of course.
Monday, October 27, 2008
Everybody likes a ghost story
And Juno Books, home of the paranormal romance, has a PDF with "Five Classic Ghost Stories" (by female writers) as a Halloween gift.
It aren't even the usual five stories, so what are you waiting for?
Wednesday, October 8, 2008
Book Report: Bill Landis & Michelle Clifford, Sleazoid Express
A very fine book about diverse exploitation genres and sub-genres as seen in the New York grindhouse cinemas around 42nd Street. It gives off a compelling "we were there" vibe, and, as long as they are talking about American films, the authors know their Ted V. Mikels from their Mike Findlays.
Problematic are the two chapters on Eurosleaze and Asian cinema. The viewpoint fixed on films that played the classic grindhouses is great when the authors are talking about American filmmakers from New York or Los Angeles, but when they start talking about Japanese cinema or Jess Franco, they sound like provincials nearly flattened by the glories of the Big City. Those two chapters are also full of highly annoying factual errors that could have been avoided by the magic power of Google.
Fortunately the rest of the book makes up for these faults, resulting in a fine and impassioned introduction to the wonderful world of exploitation.
Sunday, September 7, 2008
Book Report: Lavie Tidhar - Hebrew Punk
Lavie Tidhar should hopefully be one of the up and coming younger authors of fantastic literature. By now, there are a few fine stories of his scattered about the Web, most of them worth seeking out.
Hebrew Punk (published by Apex Publications, whose now free web magazine Apex Digest I also highly recommend) is a small collection of four longer stories of the author, connected by characters of Jewish myth - The Rabbi, The Rat and The Tzaddik.
Tidhar treats these characters as heroes of a more literary pulp adventure story, all three roaming a half-world of gangsters, vampires and colonial myth and truth. Not all four stories are equally effective at this. The first entry in the collection, "The Heist", is by far the weakest of the four (whatever became of the idea to put the strongest tale first?). As the tale of a break-in into a highly secured blood-bank it's entertaining enough, it just lacks the subtextual punch the other three stories have.
By far the strongest tale is "Uganda" (also to be found in a slightly different version online here), which blends colonial adventure story, Zionism and bits of utopian SF into a fascinating whole.
In other words: You should really read this.
Thursday, August 14, 2008
Book report: Jeffrey Thomas - Thirteen Specimens
A collection of thirteen stories, vignettes and difficult to classify texts by Thomas, who is best known for his Punktown novels and stories that mix Lovecraftian horror, SF and any other genre he can get his hands on.
The stories here are equally diverse in content, starting with the whimsical ("These Are The Exhibits") and ending in the sad and horrifying ("Door 7).
As usual with story collections, not every story is a masterpiece, but the good outweighs the bad heavily.
The already mentioned "These Are The Exhibits" sees a woman taking a tour through a very peculiar museum and opens the collection on a lighter note with an undercurrent of sadness.
Further favorites here are:
"Close Enough", a meditation on guilt and memory by way of a slightly different Vietnam war.
and
"The Mask Play Of Hahoe Byeolsin Exorcism", which sees a man on his way to meet his Vietnamese Internet bride stranded in South Korea and (as every good Giallo character would do, too) witnessing a murder. But the story is much more complex than that, as befits something about objectification and "othering".
Book Report: C.L. Moore - Black God's Kiss
This fine book published under Paizo's Planet Stories imprint collects Catherine L. Moore's Jirel of Joiry stories, which initially appeared in Weird Tales during the 1930s.
An excellent foreword by Suzy McKee Charnas says most of the things that are to say about the Jirel stories and leaves me with nothing much original to add.
Moore was an exceptional representative of the classical Sword & Sorcery writers, in part as one of the few female pulp authors, in part thanks to her lyrical (something that isn't identical with "overwrought") style and a very vivid and original imagination that produced something much better than mere pastiches of Robert E. Howard with a female protagonist.
As with many of the great pulp writers, Moore's stories are something that should be read more than talked about, so I suggest you'll just do that while I shut up.
Friday, July 18, 2008
Book report: Robert Aickman, Powers of Darkness
Robert Aickman's position in the world of fantastic literature is a strange one - on the one hand he was heavily influential on authors like Neil Gaiman, on the other his work has the tendency to be very much out of print most of the time. The second hand availability of the books is spotty, what is available tends to be somewhat overpriced.
Nonetheless I was able to acquire my first collection of some of his "strange stories", as he called them, and am positively enthusiastic. What we have here is the work of an author with a very British voice, sometimes deceptively stiff sounding, in truth precise, often highly ironic, but still graced with the ability to somehow and puzzlingly use his distancing style for full emotional effect.
"Strange Stories" really is the best phrase to describe these pieces - they are at once absolutely realistic in their characterizations and the tangibility of the details of the world they describe and utterly puzzling and unpredictable in their use of the fantastic.
Based on this book, I can't recommend Aickman's work highly enough. And it's just gotten easier to get hold of his work. "Faber Finds", Faber & Faber's new print-on-demand imprint has three of Aickman's collections in its program, for a reasonable price.
For further explorations of Aickman and his work, this site is a fine starting point.
Saturday, June 14, 2008
Good news for people who read
Author Lewis Shiner, who already put many of his short stories online, now begins doing the same with his novels.
He starts with his newest, Black & White, on paper published by the great Subterranean Press.
You can find the novel and the stories here.
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