Sword-and-sorcery pinball machines are fucking cool

That’s the post.

I love the pairing of sword-and-sorcery aesthetic with machines of glass and steel. My idle daydream is to acquire a couple. Given the time and money I’d build a dedicated gaming den, dominated by … Gorgar.

I’ve never played this but chanced upon it in a happy internet search and fell in love with this and a bunch of other games that hold a dim place in my Gen-X memories.

What’s not to love about Gorgar? Hot chick in a bikini on a bloody altar? Check. Skulls. Muscular warriors. And giant snakes everywhere (a meme has been circulating that sword-and-sorcery is when the snakes are big). “Beware of the Pit.”

And of course, Gorgar himself, a red skinned demon with a menacing bass voice. The world’s first-ever talking pinball machine.

Then there’s Sorcerer. Seriously, look at this thing: https://pinside.com/pinball/machine/sorcerer/gallery It’s got that stoned 70s vibe, an image you once saw airbrushed on the side of a van. Hard to rip your eyes away.

Centaur (1981) is absolutely balls-out as well. Take a listen to the voice and sound effects, a robotic “Destroy Centaur!” Incredible.

Even cooler, the centaur isn’t half man, half horse, it’s a half man, half motorbike. Wielding an axe. This can be none more metal.

This dude has it going on with Centaur in his game room (and don’t think I don’t see that collected edition of Captain America).

Apparently player demand for Centaur led to Centaur 2. This video gives a better look at the complex clockwork mechanisms underpinning the game. Pretty freaking cool.

A few others include

Paragon.

Black Knight (1980). 

Seawitch.

Grand Lizard.

(edit) and of course Lost World, which I once highlighted here).

Absent any space restrictions I’d include Hercules, allegedly the world’s largest pinball machine. Which is reportedly lousy to play but sizewise it goes to 11. 

Today everyone is playing fully immersive MMORPGs with photorealistic graphics and novel-quality storylines. I have no problem with this, even though I gave up video games long ago. But there is something about real steel and glass, painted cabinets and game boards and lightbulbs and rubber bumpers. The tactile, analog, reality of these games, that have huge appeal.

Further there is something about the aesthetic of the late 70s/very early 80s games in particular that grip me. The colors have that Frank Frazetta/Jeff Jones muddiness/dun pallor to them, yellows and tans mixed with splashes of bright red and pale gold. As you slide into the mid-and late 80s the cabinets are brighter, a bit more comic book bright and garish. There are still amazing games here but just a little bit outside of what I’m looking for. And while I’m no pinball historian the video game boom of the early 80s dimmed this golden age of the silver ball.

By the way this theoretical S&S game room is not restricted to pinball. I’d have Heavy Metal, Fire and Ice, Conan the Barbarian 1982 and Thundarr the Barbarian playing in a continuous loop on a projection screen. Perhaps Gauntlet in the corner, or Joust. And of course, a bar with a couple kegs of beer tapped 24-7. Which is dangerous … but sword-and-sorcery is not for the faint of heart, and ale must be quaffed in quantity. 

My tastes are simple, Conan with a slight tweak:

Let me live deep while I live; let me know the rich juices of red meat and stinging wine on my palate, the hot embrace of white arms, the mad exultation of battle when the blue blades flame and crimson, and I am content. Let teachers and philosophers brood over questions of reality and illusion. I know this: if life is illusion, then I am no less an illusion, and being thus, the illusion is real to me. I live, I burn with life, I love, I play pinball, and am content.”

We are called to live: A night with Wildside in Dracut MA

Take a ride on the Wildside. 

Many/most 50+ year-old men were probably at home watching the Celtics playoff game last night. I was called back to the 1980s, and fantasy, and a late night with Wildside.

I decided on the spur of the moment to see an 80s hair band tribute. They were playing at a place called The Boat in Dracut, where I’d never been. I felt the call. On Thursday I texted my buddy Wayne, whom I’ve known since grade school and has been my wingman at countless metal shows. Yesterday he let me know—he was in. The night was on.

I never go to Dracut. I have never had a need to go to this odd town far off any major interstate, accessible only by driving through 20 minutes of woods and farmland. Which feels like undiscovered Lovecraft country in a state this small. I navigated past rusted grain silos and empty fields and then battered mill buildings and then I was there.

The Boat as it turns out is located on the shore of Mascuppic Lake. To be frank it looks a little rough on the outside, a windowless concrete bunker with a weathered deck off to one side. You have to pass through a steel door to enter. 

Meat Raffle ... and Wildside

I knew I was in for a Spinal Tap sort of evening when I pulled into the parking lot, cut the engine, and glanced up at the marquee. Top billing was given to a Meat Raffle, with Wildside the second act. Had there been a puppet show Wildside would have been no. 3. I insisted Wayne take my picture in front of it, and wouldn’t you know it I had remembered to wear my Spinal Tap shirt.

Inside it was the place to be, if you like blonde women in tight leather pants swaying on the dance floor. Or overweight dudes, one wearing a Kix t-shirt and another a sleeveless denim vest with “The Warriors” emblazoned on the back. That Warriors, of the 1979 film. Very dark, biker-ish, but clean and well maintained, with a great center stage where the action unfolded. Kudos to the owners of this establishment and any club owner who hosts local rock and metal. 

Wildside was great. The lead singer is Ron Finn, who also sings for a Judas Priest tribute band I twice hosted at my home. I am very familiar with his work. The guy can sing, with a wonderful stylistic range and high top-end register that works for everything from “Still of the Night” to “Lick It Up” to “Screaming in the Night” (Krokus). And everything in between. AC/DC and Guns-and-Roses, Van Halen, and some fantastic Def Leppard covers. 

We heard it all, listening after midnight. Here's an upload from my phone, an excerpt of "Bringing on the Heartache."

Women and some men swayed on the dance floor, thrust fists to the heavens, air guitared along to the break in “Running With the Devil.” I did too.

A thought crossed my mind: Should I be home? No. Not for a $10 cover charge. Budweisers are $4.50. Tripoli’s beach pizza cooked hot, topped with a slice of melted provolone cheese for $5. That’s fucking living right there. I need nothing else.

Looking around, I know it’s all ridiculous. But life is ridiculous. I am ridiculous. And I love it. I love it all.

I’m going to wring every fucking last drop out of life. Why else are we living?

I am never so alive than when I’m at a metal show. I feel electric. 

It’s worth the 1 a.m. bedtime next-day fatigue and the dry mouth hangover. 

Don’t pass it up. Go to the show. Live.

Death Dealer 3: Semi-enjoyable (?) train-wreck

I’m back at it again, with a long-awaited review of Death Dealer 3: Tooth and Claw. Check out my reviews of book 1 and book 2 of this four-part sword-and-sorcery epic by James Silke.

Short, negative review: Tooth and Claw ranks among the worst books I’ve read in the last decade. The series keeps going downhill (and book 1 was not even that good).

Longer and slightly more positive review: Tooth and Claw is bad enough to cross over into WTF I can’t believe I just read that territory, and so stands out as more memorable trash than many of the boring Conan clones and generic S&S offerings I’ve read over the years.

But it’s still awful. And awful crazy.

How crazy?

Well there’s this bit:

He was the size of a tree. He was indomitable. He was immaculate. He urinated white wine, his feces were soft gold, and he ejaculated lightning.

Would I be surprised to learn the author typed the manuscript while snorting coke off a hooker’s ass? No, not really.

I’m not making any accusations here, I don’t know Silke personally, but Death Dealer 3 was published in 1989 and possessed of a crazy, whacked out Wolf of Wall Street vibe I recognize. There’s so much nonsensical, bonkers stuff in here, told wildly and with intense energy and conviction, but with sloppy execution and abysmal, eye-gouging turns of phrase.

This is basically man romance. Romance for a certain kind of man, who like their women stunningly hot, offer them few words before and after the deed but possess the skill to play them like a medieval instrument:

Tonight he would tie her down in his hide-up and play upon her like a lyre, arouse her untamed passions until she could not resist him. 

Or this bit of late-night Cinemax magic:

Gath stepped out of the concealing shadow for a clearer look. His eyes moved down the deep shadowed curve of her back to the cleft in her hard buttocks, then back up again, painting her pale flesh with his dark hot glance…. A stimulating animal pleasure rose into his groin. Heat played across his cheeks.

The plot of Death Dealer 3 hinges on the flimsiest of hooks—a disreputable bounty hunter named Gazul (with the incredibly stupid nickname “Big Hands”) wants to capture the cat-queen, Noon. Gazul offers Gath the chance to fight Noon’s guardian, the giant saber-toothed tiger Chyak, because it’s more challenge-worthy than any other fight anyone else could ever have. Which appeals to Gath, who otherwise is wandering around without purpose.

That’s the entire setup for the remainder of the book. 

This wouldn’t stand up as a plot for the weakest episode of Thundarr, yet here we are. Gath accepts the offer and we’re off, fighting lyncanthropic beast-men, lions, crocodiles and all manner of beasts of the jungle before the final confrontation with Chyak and Gazul.

The Death Dealer books stand at the far end of the barbarian archetype/stereotype, not the apex but the nadir of this type of fiction. How do you distinguish yet another barbarian from the countless others that have gone before? Make yours bigger, stronger, more barbaric. Gath is a brute force of wild nature, so deep into barbarism that at one point he strips naked, eats raw animal flesh and fails to recognize familiar faces, even losing his ability to speak (he’s channeling his animal “kaa,” you see). You can’t get more raving barbarian than this dude. He’s not a character, but a caricature. 

Silke attempts something of an origin story for Gath in this volume but it comes across as uninspired Tarzan pastiche. He also attempts to bring some level of introspection to the story with a muted/equivocal ending, some regret and “who is the real monster” angle to the proceedings. I won’t spoil it here, in case you want to seek this out. I read Tooth and Claw through to the end, groaning the whole way except when I was laughing. There is some entertainment value here; I’d probably watch a movie made out of this mess. The problem is, what works in a low-budget beer-swilling 90 minute film is not optimal for a 342 page book treatment. It sags, and there are all sorts of problems with the pacing, authorial emphasis, and cringe-worthy dialogue. Like this:

“Think of it this way, sweethips,” Gazul said callously. “Fear is a marvelous cosmetic. It puts real color in your cheeks.”

And this:

“Barbarian, I understand why you are upset. In my drunken rage at you for running off, I used Fleka wrongly. She is yours, and I should not have used her as a lure without your permission. But now that your fist has rewarded me for that mistake, we are even.”

Silke loves writing wildly indulgent and floridly descriptive paragraphs punctuated by two words. Like this:

Gnarled hands gripped the bars, appendages of the lurking darkness bent within, a wounded, scabbed darkness with hard gray eyes. Hot. Relentless. 

And this:

Lowering to hands and knees, she crawled closer to the cage, and hesitated abruptly. The bars were the colors of flowers, a dazzle of pinks and reds and scarlets. Enchanting. Compelling.

In and amongst the cringe there is entertainment value to be had, including a 12-page fight between Gath and Chyak. 

Death Dealer goes to 11... 12 for sabertooth tiger fights

A 12 page tiger fight. Cuz 11 is not enough.

Is this bad trash or glorious trash? Your mileage will vary, hard. Personally I need never read this series again. But Death Dealer is an interesting historical artifact and probably worth it if you’re after the terrific Frank Frazetta cover art, or a fearless S&S diehard junky who can’t get enough of the subgenre—good, bad, and ugly. 

And there’s still more to come with Death Dealer 4. The story continues…whenever I get around to it.

Organizing my bookshelves: How I do it (YMMV—no hate)

Tor Conan, ERB, CAS, Moorcock... and more.

It’s time to weigh in on a topic so contentious, so divided, so fraught with the potential for incendiary and orgiastic violence, that to even conceive a post on it risks burning the entire internet to the ground.

I’m talking about how to organize your bookshelves.

I know, take a breath. Let’s review. 

We have options.

Alphabetical by author, or title. By genre. Year of publication. 

Do you put your favorite books on a shelf nearest to hand? Your rares and antiques behind glass or in some other high, unassailable place? 

What do you put on your shelves (besides books, of course)? For example, comic books? Role-playing game books? What are your thoughts on knick-knacks or action figures, to break things up?

The possibilities are endless. 

Despite my considerable misgivings I’ll tell you how I do it, and then you tell me yours. But no outrage. We can be civil about this.

***

Ahh, love that Nasmith-illustrated Silmarillion.

This holiday I got myself a bookcase—six feet high, 37 inches wide, five shelves. It is my fifth bookcase, and possibly my last. At least that’s what I told my wife. She doesn’t read this blog, BTW.

The purchase gave me the opportunity to reorganize my books, an activity I find immensely relaxing and gratifying. I go into a state of flow as I do this, or perhaps active catatonia. It’s like a simultaneous mental game of Jenga (where can I fit all my Edgar Rice Burroughs books together) while remembering there are so many books I need to read, or re-read. Plus I’m reminded how glad I am to have a Ted Nasmith-illustrated copy of The Silmarillion. I need to stop now and admire The Kinslaying at Alqualondë.

It's a lot of fun. I recommend it, if you haven’t done it in a while.

Here’s how I do it.

By genre, subcategorized by author.

Part of my S&S bookcase... lots of REH, KEW, Anderson.

I have my sword-and-sorcery on one seven-shelf bookcase by itself, spilling on to a second. 

I’ve got almost two complete shelves of Tolkien. One is on my lone upstairs bookcase, alongside my more literary collection of books.

I’ve got about two complete shelves of horror.  A World War II shelf. A shelf of biographies and non-fiction. One of mostly sword-and-planet. You get the point.

Within those genres I then subcategorize, by author. So on my sword-and-sorcery shelf I’ve got about two shelves of Robert E. Howard. In general fantasy, I group all my C.S. Lewis together, next to a group of Ursula Le Guin and E.R. Eddison.

There are caveats. Many of them.

I’m forced to break my rule when the books are too large to fit on a shelf. Conan the Phenomenon by Paul Sammon resides on an unrelated shelf because it’s oversized, and won’t fit next to my other Conan books which are mostly pocket sized paperbacks. Damnit!

The horror! Is that a figurine in there?

Sometimes I break my genre rule for the sake of author solidarity. For example I’m not going to put Stephen King’s Eyes of the Dragon on the fantasy shelf. It goes on the horror shelf, next to the rest of my King books. Even though it is fantasy I can’t bear to have one Stephen King book in another random place.

Sometimes I do break the author rule, for my own utterly singular purposes. I stuck the Chronicles of Narnia and the Space Trilogy apart from my other Lewis because I didn’t want to surrender that much shelf space to titles I’m not sure I will ever read again.

I do have a shelf of classic RPGs, and with the purchase of the new bookshelf I now have a comic box of Savage Sword of Conan on that. I am thinking about digging back into these after some time in storage and wanted them close at hand.

Yes, I am aware that these are not technically “books” so I may be committing sacrilege.

Is there a better way to do all this? Almost certainly yes. It’s weird and contradictory. But it works for me. My friends are always impressed by how I can lay my hand on a given title almost immediately, without thinking.

How do you shelf your books? Do you wish to inflict harm on me for my idiosyncratic choices? Leave a comment below.

More books...

The hellscape of KISS avatars and AI art

KISS (holograms) love you!

KISS just wrapped up a 50-year career in typical KISS fashion.

Selling product.

Not content to leave the stage with a remaining shred of dignity intact, KISS left their fans with a message, and a sales pitch: “The new KISS era starts now!” And unveiled the next era of KISS.

Digitally created avatars.

The new beginning? Artificiality.

KISS presumably means to render themselves, and their income streams, immortal. “The band will never stop because the fans own the band,” explained frontman Paul Stanley.

Paying fans, with their money going to KISS in perpetuity. 

Fuck I hate the world right now.

***

Artificial entertainment is not unique to KISS. We’re being increasingly inundated with images spun out of DALL-E, text spit from ChatGPT. Fake videos with AI trained voiceovers are making it increasing harder to tell what is real.

Now we’ve got AI KISS. Holograms, programmed to move based on training data, not spontaneity.

A nightmare.

I ask, with earnestness: What is the point?

Before the advent of AI, had you asked me why I liked KISS I would probably have answered “the music."

But now I realize, it was also the band members.

People made the music. Putting aside debate about their actual talent, Gene, Paul, Peter, and Ace blended their unique backgrounds and experiences to write songs. They had several false starts and tentative steps toward their final brand image. It was a messy path of false starts, playing shows in high school gyms in front of a dozen disinterested fans, before they finally hit it big.

The end product was, almost miraculously, pretty awesome, at least from an entertainment perspective. 

Paul Stanley is a human being possessed of loves and interests, passions, faults, foibles, and flaws. As were the other members of KISS. Together they wrote great songs and terrible songs. Classic albums and awful clunkers. They did some amazing tours, limped through others, and put out some really shitty merchandise.

I love it all.

I love it because KISS is unique, and every member that served in the band, unique (especially Vinnie Vincent). It’s what makes them entertaining. This humanness is an incalculable part of what makes KISS endearing to its fans. 

KISS is easy to pick on, and mock. “They were already artificial!” OK, fair enough. But they were and are real people who against long odds, built a career most would envy.

The next era is a mockery, and its only just begun.

Will AI generated Paul Stanley paint pictures, bang groupies, have children, fight with digital Ace Frehley on Eddie Trunk? Will the band members write ChatGPT generated memoirs about their “tours”? Inspire new AI artists?

Are we supposed to go to concerts and cheer on holograms?

There is no point to AI generated art. It is soulless in every sense of the term. Because there is no soul behind it, not even a ghost in the machine. Just scraped and aggregated data, vectored and served up.

One small bit of good news is that it appears AI generated art is not copyrightable. And it doesn’t deserve to be, because there is nothing worth preserving in it. It is the pinnacle of corporate, Silicon Valley soul-lessness, a golem of circuitry built from the flesh and blood output of real artists.

If we had any sense as a species, AI would be put to use solving actual big problems like climate change and nuclear fusion. Detecting cancers unseen to the naked eye. Or automating soulless, mind-crushing tasks.

To be fair AI is being used in some of these applications. I hope these succeed. But most of the product development is being applied in the creative industries, and white collar businesses. 

Why? As with any open question about business, the answer is the same here as with any other: follow the money.

Companies are now rapidly training niche AIs and then selling them as subscription products. Businesses are already outsourcing human labor to machines, reducing overhead expense and increasing their profitability to shareholders.

This is commerce, not art.

Worse, kids are using it to write papers, teachers to grade these fake papers, “creators” to fuel their content pipeline. What are we learning? What is more impressive, a guitar virtuoso who has spent 25 years mastering his craft, a generational talent like Frank Frazetta painting with fire, or some kid putting prompts into DALL-E?

People are the losers in the AI race. As are dignity, hard work, effort, and talent.

So is the future. We’re sacrificing that, too. And we’re making a mockery of the past.

A massive part of the appeal of Conan and Solomon Kane and Kull is its creator, Robert E. Howard. Howard was rooted in Cross Plains, possessed of a voracious reading habit, writing talent, and an imagination as big as Texas. He was complex, contradictory, full of great passions, “giant melancholies and gigantic mirths.” All of it formed the wellspring of his art.

AI has none of this. There is no background to excavate, no influences to explore, no literary legacy to debate, no arguments over places in the pantheon. 

AGIs have no history. They never worked on oil fields, felt the sting of lost loves, experienced the alienation of an artistic soul in a town whose residents despised its craft.

AI generated writing is the death knell of literary criticism. How can one say anything about the output of a program, scraping and training itself on massive data sets of already existing content? A hellish, endless loop of sophisticated repetition and large-scale copying, including everything Robert E. Howard ever wrote?

To recap: AI generated art, including images and text, but also AI avatars, AI music, all of it, is void of meaning. It is shallow, empty, and purposeless.

Inhuman.

I will not be part of creating it, or consuming it. 

Neither should you.

An observation about heavy metal and sword-and-sorcery

Blue Cheer and Deep Purple = Lord Dunsany and James Branch Cabell

Black Sabbath = Robert E. Howard

Judas Priest and Iron Maiden = Fritz Leiber and Jack Vance

Metallica and Megadeth = Poul Anderson and Michael Moorcock

Queensryche and Danzig = Karl Edward Wagner and Charles Saunders

Slayer, Sepultura, Pantera = Ramsay Campbell, David Gemmell, Glen Cook

Warrant, Poison, Def Leppard = Gardner Fox, Lin Carter, L. Sprague de Camp

Black metal, death metal with cookie monster lyrics = Any Grimdark writer

Obviously meant as fun, not some profound observation.

Every art form probably goes through the same evolution, of early experimentation/breakthrough/pinnacle/steady state/commercialization and exploitation, collapse, followed by further cycles of experimentation.

I don’t have enough expertise in other types of art to say that for sure, but horror comes to mind, going through a similar arc.

If I missed your favorite author or band, no offense meant.

What is best in life?

 Look no further.

Latest Rogues in the House podcast is up: Deathstalker 2, and Flame and Crimson too

The Ultimate Sword-and-Sorcery podcast

The latest episode of the Rogues in the House podcast is now available for your listening enjoyment. The cast and crew of Rogues were kind enough to ask me on the show, and I have to say I had a BLAST. I mean, I spent last Thursday evening drinking a couple beers and talking sword-and-sorcery, Deathstalker 2, and the zaniness of the 1980s in general. 

We had way more fun than we had any right to, but if you can't laugh watching Deathstalker 2 you were obviously born without a sense of humor.

Check out the episode here. We also talked Flame and Crimson quite a bit as well.

Rogues in the House: Deathstalker 2!

You won't find this level of beefcake ...

Any fans of this fun podcast, the only program wholly dedicated to sword-and-sorcery? I’m one of them, and tonight I get the pleasure of guesting on an episode.

 

The topic? Deathstalker 2: Duel of the Titans.

 

Somehow I had never watched Deathstalker 2. I look back upon my many years of renting the most exploitative videos I and my high school buddies could find, idle time spent scrolling YouTube, the additional (painful) video research I conducted for Flame and Crimson, and I wonder how this one eluded me. The only explanation I can come up with is that Deathstalker 1 is so outrageously awful, near irredeemable, that I wanted no further part of the series. 

 

In addition, I’ve consciously avoided the S&S films of the 80s. It got too depressing to see a subgenre that gave us Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser, The Dying Earth, Conan and Kull, Elric, etc. handled so badly on the silver screen.

 

But, in recent years I’ve made peace with sword-and-sorcery films. I view them now as a cornball corner of pop culture history to enjoy as guilty pleasures. And, I’m already glad I got the opportunity to guest on Rogues because Deathstalker 2 is fun. Sword-and-sorcery fans will find their subgenre treated with about as much subtlety and reverence as Animal House did for undergraduate education. I would describe it as objectively a bad film, but subjectively awesome. It knows what it is, and while not a true parody like Men in Tights for example it is entirely a tongue-in-cheek take on S&S. 

 

Make no mistake, this is by any measure a bad movie. Really bad. The acting is below the level of a soap opera, the plot barely a thread, the script full of holes, and the sets and props are cheap and flimsy and entirely recycled. It lacks proof of having been backed by anything resembling a budget; in fact, there really wasn’t one. If there was, it was spent by the cast and crew in Argentinian dive bars. Nevertheless, I enjoyed the hell out of it. It’s a poor man’s Army of Darkness.

 

You can currently find Deathstalker 1 and 2 on Tubi, a free movie service. My advice: Skip the first and head straight to the sequel. And look for our insights and analysis of this fine film on an upcoming episode of Rogues in the House.

The Zombie Survival Guide, a review

The next time a Class 2 zombie outbreak occurs in my neighborhood, I’ll be well-prepared to deal with the shambling corpses of hungry undead now that I’ve read Max Brooks’ The Zombie Survival Guide: Complete Protection from the Living Dead.

The Zombie Survival Guide dispels exaggerated myths and legends of the undead and instead presents the reader with unvarnished “truths” about zombies. You’ll find information on zombies’ physical strength, sight, hearing, and rate of decay, and the pros and cons of various weaponry for battling the undead (everything from medieval maces and claymores, to M-16s and flamethrowers). It describes various scenarios for identifying early signs of localized (Class 1) outbreaks, to full-blown widespread undead infestation (Class 3). You’ll find best practices for battling zombies in urban settings, in harsh desert and swamp environments, even under the sea. The Zombie Survival Guide tells you how to defend your home by stocking up with key food and supplies, moving to your second floor and destroying all staircases (recommended for Class 2), or how to survive on the run as you move to the most remote and therefore safest parts of the planet in a world-wide zombie apocalypse in which mankind is overrun (Class 4). The best vehicle should an outbreak occur? You might not guess it, but it’s a bicycle. On a bike you can easily outrun the slow, slouching pace of zombies, it will never run out of gas, you can carry a bicycle over rough terrain, and you can maneuver a bike through the inevitable traffic jams that accompany a full-on panic. Motorcycles are very good too, though their noise attracts the undead. Boats are also a secure means of travel, says Brooks, but watch your anchor line—zombies walking on the ocean floor can use it to climb up to your boat. “Hundreds” of hapless victims have died this way, Brooks tells us.

Brak vs. the Sorceress: A really bad read

Ever the optimist, I managed to find a silver lining in the extreme suckiness of John Jakes’ 1977 novel Brak vs. the Sorceress, though I struggled mightily to do so.

If nothing else, it proves how talented Robert E. Howard was as a writer.

Howard could take the raw elements of a sword and sorcery story and make them come alive in unforgettable tales; in the case of Brak vs. the Sorceress one learns that muscled warriors in loincloths rescuing damsels in distress can also make for really, really bad camp.

I wish I had something good to say about this book, but I don’t. It’s not just derivative and lazy (though it is that, in spades), but it also serves as an instructive example in the art of bad writing. Brak vs. the Sorceress opens with a four-page infodump of cliché fantasy that is probably a recap of the previous book in the Brak series. I can’t be bothered to look it up and figure out whether that’s the case. Regardless, it proves utterly unnecessary to the remainder of the thinly plotted story. Here’s the description of the plot from the back of the cover, a poorly done run-on sentence that still makes the story sound much better than it actually reads:

Making his way south toward the golden land of Khurdistan, Brak must first traverse the desolate territory of the Manworm—a land gripped by terror of things unknown and awful—a land of unseen watchers and horrifying riddles—a land ravaged by the evil of Nordica Fire-Hair, the beautiful, hypnotic sorceress whose occult experiments include human sacrifice. To save the land and its terrorized people, Brak joins forces with the ailing Lord Stann and begins one of his most incredible adventures.

Basically the whole story is about how Brak accepts a mission solely to avenge the slaying of his pony and to teach a spirited woman a lesson in humility. I’m not making this up. From the book: To her the life of a pony was a small thing, and therein lay her evil. To him the pony’s life mattered much. His choice was clear-cut. He would not slink away. He would punish her. He was Brak, a man.

Got that? He’s a man, and she’s a wicked pony-killing woman. She must pay the price!

25 years of Evil Dead 2? Groovy.

Wow, has it really been 25 years since Evil Dead 2 came out? Guess it's time to break out the VCR (yes, I still own one. And lots of VCR tapes. Get offa my lawn) and do a rewatch.

If you're a fan of the film I recommend reading the linked article above. Evil Dead 2 is much better than the original, and I think it's better than Army of Darkness. The latter is a great film, too, and perhaps a bigger cult favorite with its higher memorable quote quotient, but this bit from the article sums up why I prefer Dead by Dawn over AoD (by a hair):

Army of Darkness has more than its share of fanatics, given that it provided many with their access point to the Evil Dead universe, but for me it’s never quite measured up to its predecessors. By taking the action out of the cabin and into a much larger-scale, higher-production value setting, it lacks that DIY charm, and the oddball humour sits awkwardly with the concessions made to a fairly standard studio blockbuster format; it doesn’t help that the horror elements are significantly pared back. Worse still is how Ash’s characterisation changes between the films. Far from the witless but well-meaning would-be tough guy of Evil Dead 2, in Army of Darkness he’s a mean-spirited, arrogant bastard with whom it’s very hard to empathise. Sure, Army of Darkness provides Ash with many of his most celebrated one-liners – the immortal “Gimme some sugar, baby,” and “This is my boom-stick!” amongst others – but none of them quite measure up to that single, immortal word that is evoked for the first time in Evil Dead 2… “Groovy.” 

For further reading, my own take on how I discovered the greatness of Evil Dead 2. Just like the writer of the article above I was hooked after the possessed hand sequence. My favorite part: When Ash slams a bucket over his sawed off appendage, then weights it down with a copy of Ernest Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms. Just indescribably awesome.

The day I went a-viking

How many people can say they sailed in a viking ship of their own making?

So what if the mast was made of PVC pipe, and the planking and shields of cardboard. The end product looks pretty good, and it netted us another First Place entry in the Highland Lake Boat Parade in Andover, NH, this past 4th of July weekend.

This was probably our most ambitious pontoon boat project yet. The mast and sail were a pain in the ass. That's a 10 foot piece of 3-inch diameter PVC pipe, seated in a toilet flange, screwed to a piece of thick wood, and spray painted brown. We drilled a hole at the top to accommodate an eight-foot long crossbeam made of 1 1/2 inch PVC. A few guy wires gave it stability. The sail is an old bedsheet. Red spraypaint for the vertical stripes.

I set the wife and kids to work making shields--a total of 13, including 6 per side and one for the mast. They did some awesome work. The shield bosses are tinfoil. They probably wouldn't stop a longsword or spear thrust, but they look the part.

The coup-de-grace came courtesy of my uncle. My original plan was to have the cardboard at the front taper to a whimpy point; he suggested constructing a huge prow to give our very square pontoon boat more of a sweeping longship appearance. We nailed together a few pieces of wood to frame the prow, ran a rope from the sail to the point to give it a little more lift, and voila! My uncle is a (literal) engineer, I couldn't have done it myself.

For those wondering (I know you are), the dragon head/tail are built using two pieces of styrofoam packing from an empty TV box. The head is an empty 18-pack of Coors Light. We spray painted the whole thing green. A styrofoam ball cut in half serves as the eyes and a pair of styrofoam cones are the horns.

At the conclusion of the parade we gave our ship a proper viking funeral: All but the styrofoam was burned in a pyre on the beach as the fireworks burst overhead. Much beer was consumed.

All in all it was an awesome event. My plastic axe was hungry and I was sorely tempted to pillage and plunder a few shoreside cottages but my wife had her hand on the tiller. And my 86-year-old grandmother would have none of it.

Me want

Here's some ultimate nerdity that I would nevertheless gladly wear (look closely/zoom in on thumbnails below): http://www.threadless.com/product/2293/There_and_Back_Again.

I wonder if the Tolkien Estate will be putting the smack down on this, though.

Lansdale and Keene: Two tastes that taste great together

Over the last couple weeks I’ve managed to plow through two of Joe Lansdale’s Hap and Leonard series of novels and Brian Keene’s City of the Dead. I enjoyed the heck out of all of them and thought I’d write a combined review here.

(As an aside, my posting has recently suffered quite a bit, and that’s because the high school team I’ve been covering for the local paper is playing in the Super Bowl today. From Thankgiving through the playoffs, Massachusetts high school football is crazy. I plan to get back to posting on a more regular schedule).

As I’ve said before, Joe Lansdale tells a story as well as any author writing today. Reading one of his books is like listening to a weathered Texan grandfather who saw time in the South Pacific in the Big One spinning raw war stories seasoned with equal parts humor and horror.

The two books I read were The Two-Bear Mambo and Bad Chili. In The Two-Bear Mambo Hap and Leonard set out to find Florida Grange, Leonard’s gorgeous ex-girlfriend. Florida disappeared while investigating the suspicious suicide of a black criminal, found dead in his jail cell in the Ku Klux Klan infested town of Grovetown.

Hap and Leonard are both martial arts experts and The Two-Bear Mambo features a memorable fight in a Grovetown diner that Lansdale describes as an episode of The Andy Griffith Show by way of Deliverance. Lansdale’s fights aren’t the stylized, dramatized stuff of Quentin Tarantino films, but short, fast, ugly, and dirty.

Lansdale always kicks off his books with a gripping action scene that combines drama with comedy. In The Two-Bear Mambo Leonard has just set fire to a crack house across the street, spilling a motley assortment of low-lifes into the East Texas night. Bad Chili features the two men attacked by a rabid squirrel while taking target practice in the woods with a pistol. Yes, I’m serious.

Bad Chili took a while to heat up (pardon the pun) but I very much enjoyed the slow, deliberate pace with which Lansdale sets up its frenetic payoff of a finish. In this one, Leonard’s boyfriend Raul leaves him for a biker and when both turn up dead the police point the finger at Leonard. He and Hap begin an investigation into the death that exposes an underground crime ring of violent gay pornography and larceny.

You have experience to fully appreciate Lansdale’s always-entertaining writing style. Here’s a description of a barber-shop owner from Bad Chili that I found hilarious and also brilliant in its details, immediately sketching a believable, real character:

Finally a man came over to help us. He was short and pale-skinned and had his dark hair combed back tight and plastered with something so shiny you could almost see your reflection in it. He had one of those pencil-thin mustaches like forties movie stars wore, ones make you look like you had a drink of chocolate milk and forgot to wipe your mouth. He had his colorful shirt open almost to his navel, and let me tell you, that was no treat to view. He had a chest like a bird and a little potbelly and a thin straight line of hair that ran from chest to navel and looked as if it had been provided by the nose hairs the blonde had clipped. He was wearing a gold medallion on a chain around his neck. The medallion reminded me of those aluminum-foil coins you unwrap and find chocolate inside. He must have been on the bad side of forty. A face, a body like that, you’re not born with it. It takes some real abuse and neglect to create.

As with all the two other Hap and Leonard novels I’ve read to date (Savage Season and Mucho Mojo), The Two-Bear Mambo and Bad Chili are highly recommended. I’m looking forward to picking up Rumble Tumble next.

City of the Dead is an absolutely gonzo novel. Graphic gore and sex, morbid humor, religious issues, cosmic tragedy, and more are splashed all over its pages in an entertaining package, albeit not one for the easily offended or the faint of heart.

Keene takes the familiar trope of zombie apocalypse but instead of attributing the cause to biochemical spill or ancient curse or interstellar plague Keene’s zombies are possessed by the souls of demons from the void. When they inhabit the bodies of the dead they take on the deceased person’s memories, which them doubly dangerous. In City of the Dead zombies can speak, use guns, drive cars, communicate and coordinate their tactics, etc. Animals, including dogs, birds, alligators, are zombified, too. Humans don’t stand a chance in this scenario.

A small group of humans manages to fight their way into New York to take refuge in Ramsey Tower, a reportedly indestructible skyscraper where a few hundred human survivors have holed up. The tower is a fortress, but the humans have underestimated the zombies’ intelligence and force they ultimately bring to bear to force an entry.

Keene’s book is full of morbidly funny humor: A zombie sings “the roof, the roof, the roof is on fire” after setting fire to a home with human defenders on the second floor. A zombie, ready to throw a grenade, has his hand shot off, and the grenade falls at his feet and explodes, blowing him to bits. “Now that’s what I call a hand grenade!” another zombie quips. Think of Army of Darkness level of humor.

At the same time the book takes seriously the existence of God and the demons that inhabit the bodies of the zombies. Called the Sissquim, they once walked the Earth but were banished to the outer spheres by God millennia ago. As a result they despise God and kill and eat humans out of that spite. They want to see His most beloved creation and the planet itself utterly destroyed.

City of the Dead is marred by a few lapses in logic. The zombies at times are portrayed as attacking in mindless waves, like Romero-style zombies; at other times they operate with a sense of self-preservation and shy away from shotgun blasts and so forth. The humans defending Ramsey Tower—some of which are hard-bitten military veterans with combat experience—woefully overestimate the building’s defenses, holes that are obvious to any half-attentive reader (the damn building has windows—even though they’re reinforced glass, how can they stand up to a zombie-driven truck at full speed, let alone explosives?)

If City of the Dead sounds a little like a mess, well, it is. I’m not sure how Keene intended the book to be read, as farce or serious fiction. It’s both (probably a little more of the former), but if you’re looking for a book that tells a rip-roaring, entertaining story, City of the Dead succeeds. I listened to the Audio Realms production while driving to work and I can honestly say it made my commute a much more enjoyable experience.

Zombieland: Bringing the fun, and a few rules to live by

Like most horror fans, I love zombie movies because they’re fun, gory, and suspenseful. I find the survivalist angle intriguing, too (I often find myself wondering if and how I could survive an initial outbreak of the walking dead. Equipped with my copy of The Zombie Survival Guide I’d like to think at least I’d have a fighting chance. But probably not).

But in the end the zombie films I like best are those that aspire to more than just empty action. Like all good movies, the best zombie films contain underlying social and/or political messages that give them an added dimension and another level on which they can be enjoyed.

I’m not a horror historian, but as far as I can tell the zombie film as social commentary started with George Romero. Broadly, zombies have always been a metaphor for death, but it wasn’t until 1978’s Dawn of the Dead that the walking dead were used to critique concepts like capitalism and unchecked consumer culture (as a sidenote this is why I didn’t like the new Dawn of the Dead as much as the original—the 2004 version is not only too nihilistic, but it removes all the subtext in favor of high-speed, sprinting zombie carnage).

Since Dawn other zombie films have hopped on the bandwagon of zombie apocalypse as societal/cultural critique. The most recent example is the comedic zombie horror of Zombieland (2009). Zombieland tells the story of a group of survivors trying to find their way in the aftermath of the zombie apocalypse. These include 20-something “Columbus” (played by Jesse Eisenburg), a nerdy, World of Warcraft playing recluse; “Tallahassee” (Woody Harrelson), a modern cowboy with an apparent death wish, a sardonic sense of humor and a mean streak a mile wide when it comes to zombies; “Wichita” (Emma Stone), a beautiful, guarded, hard-bitten realist, and “Little Rock” (Abigail Breslin), Wichita’s younger sister and resourceful partner in crime.

To read the rest of this post, visit The Black Gate website.

Master storytelling at work in Lansdale's Mucho Mojo

Today I’m here to sing the praises of one Joe R. Lansdale. I consider him to be one of the finest storytellers of this, and perhaps any, generation. He may not have tremendous literary depth and I'm not implying he's the greatest writer ever, but he tells entertaining, page-turning stories as well as any writer I’ve encountered. The guy is a born raconteur (I love that word).

If you’re an aspiring writer and want to study the craft of writing—pacing, plot, characterization, ratcheting up the tension, breaking it with levity—Lansdale is a master of the art and is well worth studying and learning from. If you enjoy reading entertaining stories well-told, Lansdale is your man.

Lansdale has carved out a nice career as a full-time writer. He’s written episodes for Batman: The Animated Series, stories for comic books (including Jonah Hex, Conan, and The Fantastic Four), and the novella Bubba Ho-Tep, which was adapted for the screen starring The Man, Bruce Campbell. Early in his career Lansdale was pigeonholed as a “splatterpunk” horror author, which is absolutely unfair. He apparently did write some gruesome novels early in his career, and violence punctuates everything I’ve read of his, but while graphic and real it’s not overdone. He’s a man of wide interests and moods (gigantic melancholies and a gigantic mirth, to steal a line from Robert E. Howard) and can’t be boxed off in any one genre. Here’s a link to an interview in which he states that his preferred genre is “the Lansdale genre.” That’s probably the best description of his unique style.

But despite a lengthy career and a laundry list of publishing credits, I get the feeling Lansdale isn’t that well-known. Most of the people I talk to (those that are regular readers, anyway) have never heard of the guy. An Amazon.com editorial review I came across says that Lansdale is something of a “cult writer.” If so, consider myself a junior acolyte of the Lansdale sect. I read my first Lansdale book a good 10 years ago and have only read a handful of his novels since (Savage Season, Freezer Burn, The Drive-In: A Double Feature Omnibus, and The Bottoms), plus some of his short stories. But except for The Drive-In, I’ve found them all to be very, very good.

Mucho Mojo is probably my favorite Lansdale story. It’s the second of his Hap and Leonard novels, which feature two recurring characters in rural East Texas. Hap and Leonard are two of the unlikeliest friends you’ll encounter—Hap is a white, perennially destitute, borderline honkey-tonk democrat, while Leonard is a black, gay, no-nonsense republican. Both are wisecracking, hard-fighting, no-nonsense dudes who get mixed up in a lot of tough business, including breaking up drug rings and solving murder mysteries. They always manage to extricate themselves using a mixture of martial arts, wits, and dogged determination.

There’s so much to recommend about Lansdale, but I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention how darned funny the guy is. Humor is very, very difficult to pull off in the written form, but I smiled on nearly every page of Mucho Mojo. A couple times I laughed out loud.

Here’s a sample passage from chapter two of Mucho Mojo in which Hap and Leonard are attending the funeral of Leonard’s uncle Chester while wearing a pair of bad suits just bought from J.C. Penney:

Time we got to the Baptist church where the funeral was being held, we had sweated up good in our new suits, and the hot wind blowing on me made my hair look as if it had been combed with a bush hog. My overall appearance was of someone who been in a fight and lost.

I got out of the car and Leonard came around and said, “You still got the fucking tag hanging on you.”

I lifted an arm and there was the tag, dangling from the suit sleeve. I felt like Minnie Pearl. Leonard got out his pocket knife and cut it off and we went inside the church.

We paraded by the open coffin, and of course, Uncle Chester hadn’t missed his chance to be guest of honor. He was one ugly sonofabitch, and I figured alive he hadn’t looked much better. He wasn’t very tall, but he was wide, and being dead a few days before they found him hadn’t helped his looks any. The mortician had only succeeded in making him look a bit like a swollen Cabbage Patch Doll.

The basic plot of Mucho Mojo is as follows: After Chester passes away Leonard inherits his home and a bunch of money. He also receives a handful of mysterious items in a safe-deposit box. Among other items, it contains a key to a lock box containing the remains of a child, which is hidden beneath the floorboards of the house. The mystery begins. While Lansdale reveals the killer well before the end of the novel, and telegraphs the bad guys just a bit, I wasn’t bothered. It’s the journey that makes Mucho Mojo worth reading, including the writing, the characters, the setting, and the humor. Along the way Lansdale has a lot to say about racism, bigotry, crime, and poverty.

As I mentioned above, there’s a lot to recommend in Mucho Mojo, but perhaps most of all the characterization and dialogue. Hap and Leonard are well-drawn, and while I don’t know much about Texas or its residents they certainly feel like living, breathing residents of the Lone Star state. They’re pals, and convincingly so. When I closed Mucho Mojo I felt like I was saying goodbye to a pair of old friends with whom I’d just shared great conversation over a few beers. Their dialogue reminds me of that which you’d encounter watching a Quentin Tarantino film (Pulp Fiction, Reservoir Dogs, etc.) but a bit more grounded and rough around the edges.

I’m looking forward to finally reading the rest of the Leonard and Hap novels, of which the latest, Vanilla Ride, was just published earlier this year.

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy: Still funny after all these years, and better than ever on audio

Humor is arguably the most difficult genre of writing to pull off. Hampered by the limitations of the print medium, humor writers must ply their craft without the benefit of a number of tools commonly used in live comedy and in film—visual gags, voice inflections, timing, and so on. This inherent difficulty is why good comedy writers like Dave Barry are a scarce commodity, and worth reading when you can find them.

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy is one of those rare examples of written comedy that actually works. When I last read this book back in middle school (it seemed like every dorky, D&D and Atari-playing kid like me was toting it around at the time), I enjoyed it very much. But I was in for an even more pleasant surprise when I recently returned to this book via the audio format. This was actually the first comedy I’ve listened to on CD, and I now believe that this genre might benefit the most from audio treatment. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy is a first-rate example of what a talented narrator/actor can do with funny, well-written material. English actor/comedian Stephen Fry takes The Hitchhiker’s Guide to new comedic heights, and on a few occasions I found myself laughing out loud during my commute to work. Fry literally turns the text into a running Monty Python skit.

The plot of the book is as follows: Arthur Dent, a nondescript Englishman, is about to lose his house to a construction crew in the name of progress (an overpass is scheduled to run through Dent’s property). Simultaneously, an alien race called the Vogrons has scheduled the vaporization of earth to clear the way for a hyperspatial express route. Dent is saved from destruction at the last second by his friend Ford Prefect, a roving alien researcher on the earth to complete an entry for a galactic encyclopedia called The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Prefect and Dent later hook up with Zaphod Beeblebrox, Galactic President and rogue ship-thief, and his two crewmates (an annoying robot stricken with depression and ennui named Marvin, and Trillian, a female and earth’s only other survivor). Beeblebrox has stolen a cutting-edge spaceship called the Heart of Gold and is on a mission to find the lost planet of Magrathea, rumored to hold riches beyond imagining, as well as the answers to the mystery of life, the universe, and everything.

To appreciate The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy you must like Monty Python (author Douglas Adams has writing credits in an episode of Monty Python’s Flying Circus, and appeared in two others, and his British comedy influences are plain). Here’s an example of the type of humor you’ll find:

Vogon poetry is of course the third worst in the Universe. The second worst is that of the Azgoths of Kria. During a recitation by their Poet Master Grunthos the Flatulent of his poem “Ode to a Small Lump of Green Putty I Found in My Armpit One Midsummer Morning” four of his audience died of internal hemorrhaging, and the President of the Mid-Galactic Arts Nobbling Council survived by gnawing one of his own legs off. Grunthos is reported to have been “disappointed” by the poem’s reception, and was about to embark on a reading of his twelve-book epic entitled My Favorite Bathtime Gurgles when his own major intestine, in a desperate attempt to save life and civilization, leaped straight up through his neck and throttled his brain.

The very worst poetry of all perished along with its creator, Paula Nancy Millstone Jennings of Greenbridge, Essex, England, in the destruction of the planet Earth.

Although The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy is ostensibly mere over-the-top comedy, part of the reason (I believe) for its enduring appeal are its pithy insights about the nature of humanity and the universe and mankind’s raison d’etre. Overall it’s well worth reading and/or listening to.

This review also appears on SFFaudio.com .

The Grail? I've already got one

Joseph of Arimathea used it to collect Christ's blood. King Arthur's knights spent decades questing for it, scouring Britain from end to end in a fruitless search. Launcelot, the greatest knight of all, had it within his grasp but proved unworthy.

Me? I bought the Holy Grail two weeks ago in Epping, NH. It cost me all of $5.25, plus tax and tip. Best of all I didn't have to kill any of Mordred's knights to get it, or spend decades wandering in the wasteland. Historians should take note it holds exactly 20 ounces of liquid.

The waitress seemed puzzled when I suggested in astonishment that her establishment was committing a grievous mistake by selling the Sacred Vessel at such a low price. After a raised eyebrow she completed the transaction, whereupon I feel to my knees in praise. And a 2,000-year-old quest was ended.

I didn't know how empty was my soul... until it was filled... with beer.

Zombie alert!

I'm taking a momentary diversion from fantasy battles to report an important news flash: Run, zombies are on the loose!

One of my worst fears, along with being consumed by a great white shark, is the possibility that one day the dead will walk the earth (presumably when there's no more room in hell, to steal a line from George Romero). I mean, I love zombie books and films, but when I watch or read about cannibal corpses it's with a strange mixture of revulsion, terror, and relief that I'm not one of the poor souls holed up in the shopping mall. Thus, when I clicked the link above I had a moment of panic before I realized it was a hoax.

Suffice to say that if I was driving along I-95 on the way to work and passed a sign that said "Caution!! Zombies Ahead!!", I'd be the guy you heard about on the evening news who was hospitalized after veering off into the nearest ditch. Missing the ditch, I'd be headed for home to grab canned goods, bottled water, shotgun, and axe and bee-line for my zombie-proof shelter in the basement.

(Thanks to my friend Falze for bringing this impending catastrophe to my attention).