where oh where has my little mind gone

The Bay - First Look

first real look I have found anyway ... if you have more on this (I have seen the collage shots images) please hook me up

Did You Overlook Any of these Gems

Here's an overlooked gems list of horror films. (One of the rare occasions that I have actually seen the titles on an "overlooked" list.) Well, to each his own as they say, but IMO the only real gems here are Grace and Pontypool -- both of which are available as watch instantly movies on Netflix if you're a member.

If you had to throw out a couple titles that you suspect might have been "overlooked" in the last ten years, what would you pick? I would name Thirst (Korean), a wild take on vampires, and The Dorm (Thai), a sweet but uber scary ghost story.

Halloween in February ... well sort of

Leave it to merchandising to steal the film's thunder-- and just like me to perpetuate the problem by posting it here. It's a shot of the mask from a Halloween costume of all things based on the upcoming Lizard design from The Amazing Spider Man. As I have said in the past (drooling) I love the Lizard. Always my favorite creature villain from the cartoon, and I have to say this take on his look is really promising IMO. Looks lovingly close to the original. Way back, before all the snouts and gator raptor like fusions that appear in the comics of late. If you want to see more body parts from the costume, bite here.

11 Miles & Crashing

I failed.

Yesterday I made my second attempt at running 13 miles – training for a Half Marathon.  I can do 10 pretty easily now, usually once or twice a month so 13 seems so doable, and yet the first time I set out to do it I fell apart around 9. Go figure. Yesterday, I made it over the 10 mile hump and up to 11 before running out of steam.  The more I think about it, the less I think I care if I can run 13 miles. Maybe that’s just the voice of defeat in my ear from yesterday. Maybe tomorrow I will feel like it’s the most important thing I have to do. Fact is, I don’t even know anymore how this particular mission became a mission for me. Talking with other runner’s perhaps? Might be time to let it go and just run my 10 milers for the fun of it.

The picture shows part of my route - which is essentially a stretch of what around here we call the Towpath Trail. I ran right through this very spot yesterday, minus all the warm green colors.

Here are the numbers pulled from my Garmin ...

Summary

Distance:	11.10 mi
Time:	2:05:56
Avg Pace:	11:21 min/mi
Elevation Gain:	127 ft
Calories:	2,037 C

Details

Timing

Time:	2:05:56
Moving Time:	2:05:11
Elapsed Time:	2:05:56

Avg Pace:	11:21 min/mi
Avg Moving Pace:	11:17 min/mi
Best Pace:	8:45 min/mi

Speed

Pace

Elevation

Elevation Gain:	127 ft
Elevation Loss:	146 ft
MinElevation:	694 ft
MaxElevation:	881 ft

Anyway, I would like to thank the following bands for helping me hit 11 yesterday.

James

Sisters of Mercy

The DNC

Boston

British Sea Power

The Cure

Black Eyed Peas

Tom Waits

Mando Diao

Muse

The Lizard, new Spider Man Trailer

Probably because he is the most monstrous, The Lizard has always been high on my list of Spider Man villains. With the new trailer that came out overnight, you can finally get a quick peek at the Lizard in action. Loved the Rami movies (less so the 3rd) and am looking forward to this like every diehard Spidey fan. Check out the trailer here.

Thale, the Trailer

A lady with a tail? A some weird uber creepy creature that reminds me of the skinny,  diapered zombie wreck from REC? I'm in. Check out the trailer for this Norwegian fantasy/horror movie.ere

Walking Dogs - Shiver

I want to let you in on a little secret. You know what really scares me? Sure, there is the usual stuff like politicians, cancer, Kardashians, and liver, but also dogs. More specifically, dogs walking upright, like people. Cute, clever, endearing? Some would say, but not me.  In the context of a circus maybe, but just out and about? No freaking thanks.

There was a time when I would try and watch America’s Funniest Home videos, but too often there would be a clip of a dog walking around and I would have to look away or, as I decided, just to never watch the show. Don’t get me wrong. I love dogs (and cats) but when they walk around on hind legs, well, my skin crawls a little. It’s unnatural and unnerving. Does it creep you out?

Here in the blogosphere we spend a lot of time talking about books and movies that scare us, but how bout the other stuff. Do you have a “walking dog” type scare that you can share?

Don't Order the Blue Crab

Here's an old post -- the source of this pretty little photo collage. Are you curious? Have a look, just don't eat the Blue Crab. So looking forward to this.

Legendary Pictures Godzilla Art Concept - Not

If you are tracking the new Godzilla movie in the works (very early stages of in the works) you might like to read about these two art concepts that were rejected. I think the top one is pretty good actually, but who knows what beef someone had with it. Much closer to the original than that crazy f------ mess Emmerich fathered into filmdom.

Dolls Parts

Here's a little creepy-ass eye candy for those of you who get doll willies ... for more, click here.

Role Reversal -- Creatures Beware

I would love to see Julie Adams cradling the Creature from the Black Lagoon in her arms. Doesn't work with the overall premise behind the poster here, but would still be funny. A little. Click here to see a few more and to get the scoop behind tiny Kong. Would love to see a whole series (more than 3) of these.

Robert Aickman - Horror Master

Have you ever read Robert Aickman? I hope so. 

His are the kind of slow-burn, psychological horror stories that have me picking my beard after just a few pages. These are the kind of stories that haunt and build suspense through suggestion, by artfully leaving out. And the writing itself, very polished, literary. There are moments you find yourself uncertain about the meaning of a scene, an image, a statement. This is not your garden variety uncertainty, like not being sure exactly what time it is; ambiguity and uncertainty in Aickman’s work ooze a kind of subtle menace that coils like hot dread in your gut. The first Robert Aickman story I ever read is called The Trains. I would say this about the story. If you have ever ridden on a train, you might have noticed that as you pass through small towns that people on the streets will often wave. Mostly kids I suppose. In this story, there is a reality behind “the wave” that might just take your head off. S-c-a-r-y.

 

Here are a few strokes for Aickman by two very good horror writers:

“Robert Aickman has a gift for depicting the eerie areas of inner space, the churning storms and silent overcasts that engulf the minds of lonely and alienated people.  He is a weatherman of the subconscious.”

   --Fritz Leiber

“Robert Aickman is incomparable - a genuinely authentic original and an absolute master of psychological fiction.”

   --Dennis Etchison

Side note: I can’t prove it, but I wouldn’t be surprised to find out that Etchison’s incredibly good story “It Only Comes Out at Night” and then again “The Dog Park” aren’t guided in part by Aickman’s hand.

Here’s a quotation from Aickman:

"I do not regard my work as 'fantasy' at all,  except, perhaps, for commercial purposes.  I try to depict the world as I see it ... I care about the literary art, and I know exactly what the Ancients meant by 'the promptings of the Muse'.  The stories which I consider to be my most successful came to me as if dictated...  The true ghost story is akin to poetry:  only in part is it a conscious construction, and when the Muse does not speak, you cannot write it."

    -- “An Essay”

More background on him here and here. With a little Christmas money in my pocket, I just order used copies of Wine Dark Sea and Cold Hand in Mine from www.abe.com. Should be arriving any day now.

Horror Stories - What to Leave Out & Jeffrey Ford

My reading has reached junkie proportions now and shows no signs of letting up; in fact, the list of books "in transit" that I requested through our local library and its partners (Search Ohio and Ohio Link) is mighty hefty indeed (Think I'll just back a truck up to the library).

1. The corn maiden and other nightmares / Joyce Carol Oates.
2. Dangerous laughter : thirteen stories / Steven Millhauser.
3. The knife thrower and other stories / Steven Millhauser.
4. Assorted fire events : stories / David Means.
5. Best horror of the year : 1 / by Ellen Datlow.
6. A Walk on the darkside : visions of horror / edited by John Pelan.
7. Proverbs for monsters / Michael A. Arnzen        
8. Borderlands 2 : an anthology of imaginative fiction / edited by Thomas F. Monteleone                
9. The collected stories of Carol Emshwiller.            
10. The early Long / Frank Belknap Long      
11. Owls hoot in the daytime and other omens / edited by John Pelan.       
12. A touch of strange [by] Theodore Sturgeon
13. Fugue state : stories / Brian Evenson ; with art by Zak Sally.        
14. The Anchor book of new American short stories / edited by Ben Marcus.
15. Samuel Johnson is indignant : stories / Lydia Davis.       
16. Assorted fire events : stories / David Means.    
17. The secret goldfish : stories / David Means.       
18. The Barnum Museum : stories / by Steven Millhauser.
19. The Mammoth book of best new horror. Vol. fourteen / edited and with an introduction by Stephen Jones

Actually, many of the books on this list fall under headings such as Fantastic (in the tradition of the weird tale perhaps) & Fantasy -- not "horror" -- though guys like Evenson regularly end up in Best Of horror anthologies. But these are all slippery terms so why bother I suppose.

Much of what I have been reading is more traditional horror (creature, supernatural, etc.) from various anthologies--quite a few of which seem pretty uneven cover to cover, with four or so really good stories, some mediocre, and some just plain old duds. By 'really good' I mean both very well written and very scary; but too many of the stories are painfully overwritten IMO. Details elaborated on or explained that don't need elaboration. Events or happenings interpreted that don't need interpretation. I mean, what the hell, you just gotta trust the reader to make some leaps and "get it" along the way. Otherwise you end up writing a map complete with a "let me spell everything out for you" legend it seems, not so much a story. One collection I recently finished, Jeffrey Ford' Empire of Ice Cream, had 3 superb stories: The Beautiful Gilreesh, Boatman'sHoliday and The Trentino Kid. 

Here is one more review.

I think about Carol Emshwiller and a short piece she penned on writing rules to break, specifically the "leaving out" idea would benefit some of these stories I have been reading. If you have read any of the books on the list above, would love to hear your thoughts.

The Bay 2012

I am trying to think back on this year's best horror movies to compile a Top 5 list and am coming up pretty empty handed; in the meanwhile, this sounds promising. The Bay.

Reading List - What Scared the $#!@! Out of You?

What are you reading, or have you read recently, as far as horror short story collections go, that really knocked your socks off? I have been staying up late picking through old editions of the Mammoth Book of Horror, volumes 1 - 4, and there are plenty of good scares in there, and  I am picking up Joyce Carol Oates' new book Corn Maiden and other Terrors from the library soon, but I like to keep my bedside piled dangerously high with "to read" selections so am looking for more, much more. Also recently finished John Langan's Mr. Gaunt and other Tales. (Meh.) Primarily interested in short story collections, but if you have a novel that you consider a "must read" lay it on me.

Devil's Slide

As Wordsworth once wrote: 'I grew up Fostered alike by beauty and by fear …"

I would say I did, too, but in my case, a little more fear than beauty maybe. I met the Devil in the 60's, you see.

Here is an old photo I found online of the infamous Devil’s Slide, a notorious stretch of highway along the coast of California where "falling rocks" signs dotted the roadside and cars plunging off the edge to the ocean below were a regular news story. As a kid, I had to travel this road many times whenever we went to and from El Granada to San Francisco and back. Southbound, from the passenger seat I would have had the drop-off side of the road (a mere bread crust of space) right out my window--though mostly I could barely bring myself to look. The picture does not quite get you there, but for a child looking out the window the edge seemed a gust of wind away. And then swoosh, down that terrible drop to the ocean and rocks below. During my life in El Granada, there was  no shortage of reports of cars going off the edge and families plummeting to their death. More recent photos show that they've added a lot more guard railing. But when I lived there, this is what it looked like. Give me a Wordsworthian cataract any day.

Creatures, Thirty Years of Monsters

Ho Ho Horror Stories galore here.

If you are looking for a last minute gift idea for that special twisted horror fan on your list, consider this book. Creatures, Thirty Years of Monsters. Quite a mix of really fun monster tales, but maybe the stories should speak for themselves.



Here are a few excerpts from some of my personal favorites ....

When Max Beecham  was eight years old, his mother Deena (delirious from antihypertensives) gave him a Polaroid and then lay down on the carpet behind him. Inside the white border of this photograph lurked a thing with the naked body of a gaunt man and the head of a dark, decayed stag. In sat on a tree stump the way neighborhood men sat on bar stools, surrounded by a cavalry of thin, burned trees …. Absolute Zero, by Nadia Bulkin

I enjoyed throwing them about. I raked meat off the bone, lathed, splintered, and shredded; wrung, wrenched, rooted. and uprooted. I opened them to the jungles. I unearthed their wet centers.
The Creature from the Black Lagoon, by Jim Shepard (note: this and other stories in the first section of the book are written from the point of view of the monster.)

It made its home in the deep forest near the village of Grommin, and all anyone ever saw of it, before the end, would be the hard eyes and the dark barrel of its muzzle. The smell of piss and blood and shit and bubbles of saliva and half-eaten food. The villagers called it the Third Bear because they had killed two bears already that year. But, near the end, no one really thought of it as a bear, even though the name had stuck, changed by repetition and fear and slurring through blood-filled mouths to Theeber. Sometimes it even sounded like “seethe” or “seabird”. The Third Bear, by Jeff VanderMeer

Even so, the numbered dead began a backward count. One by one, the bodies went gone, and when fifteen or twenty had most definitely been taken, or lost, that’s when we began to hear the noise at night. It was hard to calculate, hard to pinpoint. Hard to explain, or indicate. But it rattled like the bones of death himself. beneath a robe or within loose hanging skin. It wobbled and clattered back behind the sheds where the dead were kept.

It walked. It crept.

It gathered. Wishbones, by Cherie Priest

Also, even though I didn't have time to keystroke any of it into the post, Sarah Langan's The Changeling is fantastic--heart-breaking and terrifying. Looking forward to finding more of her work and (wishful thinking) her first collection.

Help Meeeeee: Obssessed with Not Dying

I made a weird leap last night. I was thinking about The Fly, the classic one, and I realized that what was so damn disturbing about the man-headed fly, apart from the pitiful “help meeeeeee” and a image itself, is that I am forced to imagine how awful it would be to die an insect death informed by human consciousness. Here, the kind of dumb indifference most of us would ascribe to a fly is swapped out with a human awareness of mortality, exploding with horror at the brutal prospect of being food, painfully dying. Being eaten alive is not my idea of a good time, unlike say a certain punk rock girl is some 80's Zombie movie: "Do you ever fantasize about being killed? Do you ever wonder about all the different ways of dying, you know, violently? I wonder like, what would be the most horrible way to die? Well for me, the worst way would be for a bunch of old men to get around me, and start biting and eating me alive.” (Bonus points if you know the source.) In fact, I went through this miserably long nightmare phase in my teens that involved being eaten alive. In the nightmares, I am still alive and contained in in great crushing pain while passing through some giant predator’s mouth, down its throat, into the stomach. Thankfully, I am a lucid dreamer and would always wake myself up before ... before what? I was shit out I guess. Insult to injury.

"We don't like to die; and if we have to die, we don't like to think of our own dead bodies feeding other creatures". This is a line I copied from an essay by John Daniels, a poet and nature writer. Daniels comes to this conclusion after he encounters a swarm of ants trying to kill a beetle. He's repulsed by the scene of ants swarming over and killing a beetle because he sees a glimpse of his own mortality in the drama. Perhaps this is true. Predation in nature reminds us of our own mortality--and this scene from The Fly really rubs our nose in it--of course there are dozens of other monster flicks that the same. Old HD Thoreau's journals are rich in accounts of predation. In one case, he writes about a snake trying to eat a toad and as Thoreau arrives, disrupting the scene, the snake coughs up the toad and flees. (I know it's not a toad but it's the best pic I could find.) The toad leisurely jumps away and Thoreau notes what he calls the toad's "healthy indifference".

I struggle not to see such acts as symbols of human mortality. Mine. The reflex is habit but I am working on it. I always point out to my son, when we witness predation and the like, that it is part of the cycle of life and that the snake (or whatever it is that's eating someone) is not being mean, it's just being a snake.

I like to think I am laying the groundwork for a better perspective - one, and I have to overlook the hypocrisy - I am still trying to embrace. Is it possible to evolve a kind of healthy indifference toward death? I can't imagine how. I have this son I adore and want to be around for his whole life. And, when do I show him The Fly?

Thinner

33.2 lbs. thinner ... a different kind of thinner than if a gypsy cursed me, but still thinner ..

that's how much weight I have lost since October 5th when I started weighwatchers and really picked up my running .. ran 8 miles today in fact.


In honor of losing the chub, here's a shot of shark boy from Hungry--one of my favorite X-Files episodes. He knew all about eating, and eating and eating ...