As it Happens, I am a Horror Writer

Or "horrorist", which is what I prefer to be called. But however you choose to refer to me and my work, know this: I spend many hours each and every month plumbing the darkest corners of my soul to produce fictions which are a scream of terror at the world which has produced them. "Them" being the screams, which are being screamed at the world, which produced them. It's sort of a Moebius strip of blackness, like society.

My first two novels are finished (the second is the sequel -- or child -- of the first), and are awaiting publication. The only thing left to do is find someone who will publish them. In the meantime, allow me to wet your whistle (with blood, most likely) with the back-cover copy of each of the novels. It might seem odd to have back-cover copy for something that doesn't have a back-cover, so if that bothers you, you can look at them as free-verse advertisements for my work. Do what you want, I don't care.

Four brothers…happy kids who played Army and Indians when they were young in the peaceful town of Waterspring Falls . It was the 1960s when they were kids, so they listened to rock and roll music and protested wars when they got older. They were full of ideals!

Four brothers…each of them has a pretty good life now. One guy is Dale, and he owns a bunch of car selling businesses. Barry is one of those bankers who goes to New York and sells stock. Dominic is a chief of police who has a happy family and a wife and also might run for mayor because everyone likes him and wants him to. Harrison just sold a really funny TV show about a group of love-starved city friends to a TV station.

Four brothers…EACH OF THEM HAS A SECRET! Dale has psychic powers, Barry stole some money from where he worked, Dominic thinks that he’s probably gay, and Harrison knows who really committed all those murders of those kids from a long time ago…and it wasn’t the guy everybody thought did it at the time!

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Four brothers…WHO DON’T EVEN KNOW THE WORST PART OF THE WHOLE THING! It is a secret that lives under Waterspring Falls (where they all came back to for a kind of reunion)…and it has been waiting…waiting for them! What will these four brothers do when they are attacked by…

THIS

by

Bill R.

* * * * * * * *

Dale Summerson has returned to Waterspring Falls . Probably about ten years ago his three brothers were all killed by an ancient monster they called ‘This’, because whenever they tried to call it by the name it actually had they all choked on horror. They defeated ‘This’, but at what cost?? Anyway, Dale has come home again, almost like it was for the first time ever, because he feels drawn to it. He hasn’t ever gotten over his brothers being killed, even though one of them was a murderer. Dale is still psychic, though, which is something.

But what is waiting for him in Waterspring Falls ?? Strange happenings plague him!

…there is a strange old preacher in town who keeps talking about how the world’s going to explode if people don’t watch out for their souls…

…he finds himself haunted by the ghost of one of his dead brothers (it’s the gay one)…

…townsfolk keep asking him things like “How is Beatrice doing?” Who the hell is Beatrice??...

…also, he’s almost positive there’s a little kid running around town whose eyes glow…

But that doesn’t even begin to cover it! Yes, ‘This’ was killed (they used fire), but so why does the ground still rumble? Why do people still hear that weird cricket-y type noise at night, which isn’t even crickets? And why do the citizens of Waterspring Falls keep disappearing??

What if ‘This’ wasn’t the only one? What if ‘This’ had babies? All of Waterspring Falls is in danger now, because what will they do if they are attacked by…

THESE

by

Bill R.

* * * * * * * *

Can you help but be a different human after reading these books? I wouldn't think so. Let me know how that goes, though, because I'm really curious.

Note: Anyone familiar with the work of the great Garth Marenghi may be tempted to believe I stole this idea from him. I did not. I wrote these a long time ago, before I'd ever heard of him. Anyway, while the basic format is the same, the style is pretty different. Judge for your ownselves if you don't believe me! More importantly, if you've never seen the TV show Garth Marenghi's Darkplace, do so at once. It's six episodes of pure genius.

Overshadowed Prologue: How Do You People Do It?

Some of you may have noticed a comment I left a few posts back where I said that I was officially reading Pierre Boulle's Monkey Planet in preparation for the first post in my new series, Overshadowed. Technically that was true, but right now I'm only about 25 pages in, as I had other reading I wanted to finish up before fully tucking into Boulle's very slim novel (even though I'm only 25 pages deep, I still only have about 100 to go). That other reading is now finished, and I should be done with Boulle's novel in a day or two, which means I'll only be a few days over my vague and self-imposed deadline for putting up the post. So that's okay.

This also means, however, that the post will be going up either on Friday night or sometime during the weekend, a fact which leads to the question asked by today's post title: how do you people do it? And by "you people", I mean Jonathan, Fox, Rick, Marilyn (are you still around, by the way??), and all you other bloggers who have regular day jobs like I do, but somehow manage to get your longest and most thoughtful posts up during the week. I sometimes manage that, but generally I have to wait until the weekend before I feel like I'm fully able to marshall my resources and time and mind-powers, so that I may bring you, my readers, the thick slabs of wonderfulness you so crave.

Also, I generally have no obligations on weekends. I don't have kids, and my wife and I no longer speak, so it's just easier for me to post then, but I'm painfully aware that traffic to this site is way down on weekends. I guess because you all have shit to do or something. Going to museums and zoo meetings and Little League football parties. Well, I have none of that on my plate, so the premiere post for Overshadowed will go up when I say it will. And then if none of you come by the day it goes up, or the day after, I'll just let it sit, with no new posts to push it from the top spot, until Monday. If you still don't come by on Monday, then thanks for nothing, you fuckers.

PS - Just writing this post has been a real bear. So you see what I'm talking about, right?

RIP - John Updike

In the spirit of full disclosure, I must point out that I have never been able to finish a John Updike novel. I've tried many times, and each time I came up empty. It's possible that my tastes are simply not compatible with Updike's very thick (as opposed to dense) style, although I doubt it, as I'm a fan of many writers whose writing could be similarly described. I don't know what it is, but I'm not going to choose the occasion of his passing to try and figure it out.

Because really, my opinion of Updike's fiction doesn't matter. He has made his mark on the vast landscape of American literature -- not just that of the 20th century, but the whole of it. Since I've been aware of him, he -- along with Roth, Bellow, and a few others -- were considered the gold standard, and each of them have achieved immortality. They will be read for centuries, and their humbling prolificacy, particularly Updike's (although lately Roth is really cranking them out himself) showed what it really meant to be a writer, and to live as a writer: in short, for that to be what you are.

Updike's output is truly staggering: 27 novels, 13 collections of short fiction, 9 collections of poetry, 10 collections of essays, and 1 play. He won two Pulitzer prizes, for Rabbit is Rich and Rabbit at Rest, and was perversely denied the Nobel Prize, I guess so the committee could squeeze in Dario Fo and Elfriede Jelinek. His last (or most recent, at least; who knows how many unpublished books are on their way) novel is The Widows of Eastwick, a sequel to his famous The Witches of Eastwick. That was published last year. His last (or most recent) collection of stories is slated for this year, and is called My Father's Tears and Other Stories.

As someone who does not count himself among Updike's legion of fans (which is not necessarily the same as "admirers", among whose number I do count myself), I can say without hesitation that Updike was unquestionably a giant of American fiction.

RIP.

So...

...that happened.

That Old Hag Hates My Ass

Having just returned from seeing Clint Eastwood's Gran Torino, I'm wondering if I should let it sit for a while, think about it a little more, turn it over. "Think about what?" I ask myself. I've listened to and read the criticisms that this film has received since its release -- it's old-fashioned, some of the acting's not up to par, Clint Eastwood can't sing, even that the whole film is "embarrassing" -- but my gut reaction right now is that none of those complaints hold an ounce of water. This was a profoundly emotional film for me, to the point where the critics who howl at Eastwood's sincerity and plain-spoken approach to the material (one thing this film is not is subtle) make me genuinely angry, and make me think that they are not to be trusted. I wouldn't trust them to remember to pick me up some Gator-Ade, let alone accurately describe and judge Eastwood's latest film.

So maybe I should let Gran Torino sit for a little while longer, but I guess I'm not going to, because here I am, already on the second paragraph. Which is around the time that I'm supposed to offer up a brief synopsis of the film, which I probably don't have to at this stage of its release, but here it is. Eastwood plays Walt Kowalski, a bigoted Korean War vet whose wife has recently passed away. Living by himself in a run-down suburb of Detroit, he watches his neighborhood fill with Hmong immigrants, as well as Hmong gangs, and he watches his grandchildren behave like uncaring animals at their own grandmother's funeral. In short, from where he sits (on his porch, with his dog, drinking Pabst Blue Ribbon), he's seeing everything he values slipping away.

One night, one of the his younger Hmong neighbors, a quiet kid named Thao, tries to steal Walt's prized 1972 Gran Torino, as part of the initation into a Hmong gang (headed up by his cousin) that he actually wants no part of. Walt chases the kid off with his rifle, and a few nights later busts up a fight between Thao and the gang that spills from the neighbors' lawn into his own. As the rest of the immigrant community in Walt's neighborhood actually can't stand these punks any more than Walt can, he is thereafter seen as something of a minor hero, though his liberal use of epithets like "zipperhead" and "gook" cause his coronation to be fraught with tension. Still, Walt's racism, repellent as it is, is revealed to be of the casual, habitual variety, and not the virulent, to-the-bone type -- we learn this because Walt grows to like his next door neighbors (one small detail I liked is the fact that, when Walt's benign nature starts to show itself early on, it's always after he's had a few drinks), particularly Thao, who does odd jobs for Walt to amend for trying to steal his car, and Thao's sister Sue, a very bright young girl who doesn't merely shrug off Walt's slurs, nor does she fire some of her own right back, which is the typical Hollywood method of melting the hearts of genial racists. Instead, she shows that she understands the kind of old man Walt is, and that he is actually a good person who through a mix of anger that is both justified and unjustified -- so much of both that he can no longer tell the difference -- has found his preferred way of living and thinking stuck in the past, and he is in no mood to do any tweaking.

If all of this sounds a little schematic to you, that's because it is. And there's more: Walt has a very bad cough, the gang is going to keep hassling Thao until somebody does something about it, Walt's priest wants him to go to confession, and so on. But had Gran Torino been made in the late 50s, early 60s, the simple, direct and open-hearted storytelling that is being derided in some quarters, would be pointed to as what used to be so great about American movies, and isn't it sad that filmmakers these days consider it unhip to be that old-fashioned. In other words, these critics seem to bemoan the absence without actually wishing for the return.

I've also heard some claim that Gran Torino is, at times, laughable, which is an odd complaint to make about a film that is trying, and succeeding, to be funny at least half the time. Walt flings around his slurs to a truly ridiculous degree, peppering his sentences with them the way most people these days use "like" or "fuck". Of course, when he takes Thao to his local barbershop, run by John Carroll Lynch, to teach him to talk like a man, Thao calls the barber a "dago prick", because that's what Walt just called him. Walt, however, warns the kid that he could get into serious trouble using that kind of language around a stranger.

Where the film really finds its place is in Walt's bitterness and sadness and guilt. He is not a happy man, he doesn't much like himself, and he knows that he doesn't have much time left. He is haunted by his war experiences, and though he claims to be at peace with himself, that peace really just involves him sealing himself away from everyone else, to the greatest degree possible, so that he can quietly drink his beer and smoke his cigarettes and pet his dog. The moment in the film that has been played up in commercials, when Walt, holding his rifle, growls "Get off my lawn" really kind of sums it up. That phrase by this time is an old joke used to evoke any old, unfriendly guy that the unoriginal funny-man spouting the cliche' has ever known, but has not actually known, and has never spoken to. Gran Torino's theme really has less to do with race than it does with the old notion that there's a lot more to people than what you think you know about them, because you're not that smart, and neither am I, and neither is Walt.

Oh, and yes, Clint Eastwood sings briefly at the end, and he doesn't have a very good voice. But I can't help but wonder if he did have a strong voice, would that moment have been so moving? I don't believe it would have been.

Performance

Today, at Tractor Facts, one of the many film blogs I frequent, there has been quite a lot of talk about acting, actors, performance, performancing, playing pretend for money, and so forth. The various conversations in which I've been taking part have made me think about my own tastes in this area. As it turns out, my tastes are very difficult to pin down, as I'm sure are many of yours: every time I think I prefer a more restrained, subtle, naturalistic style of acting, along comes some big, arm-flailing, frothing, insane performance that knocks me out, and which makes me realize there is no preferable method of acting, just as there is no better way of writing. As Martin Amis often points out regarding the latter, all that matters in the end, all that survives, is talent. Obviously, a talented artist can blow it, but if an actor swings for the fences and nails it, all my supposed inclination towards quieter work withdraws, because this actor or actress in this role had to take that shot, and if it works, it works. It may seem ridiculous that Daniel Day-Lewis stayed in that gorilla suit weeks after shooting ended, but you can't argue with the results.

All of which is a rambling and only tangentially related introduction to the idea of this post, which is to simply list some of my personal favorite performances, with the specific intent of steering clear of some of the comfortable favorites that I bring up way too often around here. So sorry, Griff Furst in Transmorphers, but you're going to have to sit this one out.

Speaking of big, James Cagney as Cody Jarrett in White Heat must be, in my view, the most successful manic, over-the-top piece of acting I've ever seen. I can't think of another film that focuses so intently on an unrepentent, murderous criminal that manages to elicit genuine empathy from the audience without ever romanticizing him, or demonizing those who are pursuing him, and without ever even making you feel less than repelled by him. Most of the credit for that has to go to Cagney. It's an incredible performance.

Roger Livesey and Anton Walbrook cannot be considered separately when thinking of The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp. Clive Candy and Theo Kretschmar-Schuldorff live particularly strongly for me, because I'm pretty sure this was the first film that I saw featuring either Livesey or Walbrook, so I had nothing in particular to expect from their work. What I got were two actors who understood to the bone the lives of the men they were playing. Walbrook's speech towards the end about how he believed the war with Germany should be waged is breathtaking (not just as a performance, but as a piece of writing), and Livesey was uniquely capable of making the audience forget the not-quite-there quality of his old age makeup because by the end, his eyes and voice did all the work anyway. All the gunk could have been stripped off his face and the then 37 year-old Livesey could have retained his natural appearance, and no one would have failed to understand the film's ending.

One thing that actors aren't asked to do very often these days is play a character who is truly and uncomplicatedly decent and good. But that's what Philip Seymour Hoffman was asked to do in portraying Phil Parma in Magnolia. To be honest, his scenes with an equally impressive Jason Robards could have been a bit of a disaster if Hoffman had pulled back or pushed forward just a little bit more than he did. But he hit the seam dead on, so we have a Phil Parma who I believe could actually exist, and one who displays full-hearted emotion to the point even of being, yes, sentimental. But Hoffman knows deep down that "sentimental" isn't itself a bad thing. Dishonest sentiment -- what we call "sap" -- is the real culprit when roles like this go bad, but Hoffman is honest. He means what he says.

Nice picture, right? Apparently, Barry Nelson is not one of the first things people think about when considering Kubrick's The Shining. And yes, I know, Nelson is barely in the film, but he does something very important: he, more than anything else, sells the normality of the Overlook Hotel early on, so that the horror can dawn on the audience at the same rate as it does the characters. Anything in those first several minutes of the film that might put us on edge come from Kubrick, not the hotel itself or those who work within it. Stuart Ullman is not haunted. He's just a guy who runs a resort hotel with a bloody past, but damn it, he needs a caretaker. I love the straightfoward vibe Nelson puts across in the job interview scene, as well as his reluctance in telling the story he fears might scare off his propective employee. This is the last bit of business he needs to take care of before he gets out of that place, but it's vital, and it needs to be done honestly and correctly. So he does it. I would be fascinated to see Nelson play Ullman's reaction when he finally, some months later, receives the news.

Judge Thomas Danforth, as played by the incomparable Paul Scofield in Nicholas Hytner's insanely underrated adaptation of The Crucible, is a man with an open mind. He is not going to idly sentence anyone to hang just because they've been accused of witchcraft. He will sift through all the evidence, and draw on every bit of knowledge he has acquired on this subject over his long life, and he will condemn only those who are truly guilty. And, of course, he's wrong about everything. But he is acting in good faith on the wisdom of the era, and Scofield plays that. Scofield's Danforth has no ulterior motive. He is not a monster. He has innocent blood all over his hands, but when he calls Day-Lewis's John Proctor the "Antichrist", he is convinced that this is the truth. I think this performance is absolutely astonishing in its subtlety.

I could go on all night with this, but I'll cut it off now. Please drop in and tell my how dumb and gay my picks are, and why your own favorites are not even gay at all, but are, rather, quite wonderful. I will seriously consider all opinions.

Max and One of His Friends

From /Film, where you can find a bit more.