Oh, Doghouse, where have you been my whole life? I’m not saying I haven’t been into the other zombie comedies, the Shaun of the Deads, the Dead & Breakfasts, all the way back to Hysterical! and the splatter comedy Romero was kickstarting in Dawn of the Dead, and all the way up to Ahh!! Zombies! But Doghouse, it’s got the male-bonding (in stupidity) thing going on that Hot-Tub Time Machine had, that The Hangover was kind of predicated on, but it’s got the serious kind of gore we k…
Let the Right One In was a vampire novel we hadn’t seen before, almost like it was trying to be an antidote to things going on in the genre. Not so much a return to form, but a reboot. And then Handling the Undead gave us a completely different kind of zombie, one which is maybe better at expressing our current set of anxieties than the flesh-eating shufflers we’re used to. So of course I came to Harbour expecting more of the same from John Ajvide Lindqvist—which is to say my expectatio…
I mean — I don’t know. But look:
- Tin Man was 2007, Fringe debuted 2008
- each features someone who grew up in a parallel world (Peter, DG)
- each features someone who has had ‘knowledge’ surgically removed from their brain (Walter, Glitch)
- each has a ‘mystic man’ (each played by someone with starpower, too: Nimoy, Dreyfuss)
- each has automatons (DG’s ‘parents,’ Walternate’s shapeshifters)
- each has a doomsda
Just a rough list of the e-book issues I can think of. And, I should say up top here that I’m pretty much addicted to my Kindle. So this isn’t an attack on e-books (which — a lot of of those are taking the form of nostalgia, right? like when we went from cassettes to CDs?). At the same time, I see nothing wrong with the already-proven technology of the paper book; I’m fairly addicted to them as well. And, yes, a lot of times this pro/con argument, it’s eviling …
Sex & Nudity
A woman is seen naked, from behind, but it’s through two doors, and in the point-of-view of a killer tire, so it’s not really anything you can do much with.
Profanity
Not excessive, and what’s there’s mostly from the ‘spectators’—the embedded horror-movie audience meant to offer the same objections we would, or already are, thereby anticipating and perhaps deflating those objections (think the pirate contingent in the theater watching Spongebob, or the W…
Or: The subject line that comes to mind now that I just finished up the Deadwood series. Or: just to write dialogue like that once, ever. I mean, yeah, it’s all kinds of fakey and staged and overblown, but it’s that kind of fakey and staged and overblown and David Mamet-y that feels like playwrights had a pen involved. The lines Swearengen and Bullock and Tolliver and the rest would deliver every episode, they always had this cool Elizabethan kind of vibe to them, though always und…
I can’t imagine I’ve actually remembered every book I’m in, so, if you find one missing, let me know, I’ll see what I can get done. And, these aren’t journals/mags/zines, just anthology-types. And craft books. And annuals/best-of-the-year stuff.
Because this is a “gallery,” that means that when there’s not enough images to fill a row, these bottom one or two covers will balloon up to fill the space. So, they’re j…
Some movies just make you happy. Feast was this was for me. And Severance. And Leslie Vernon. And, though it’s more over-the-top, Club Dread. Horror comedy’s where it’s at, I think, though there’s a line, yeah; while I’ll sign up any day of the week for a Decampitated viewing, I don’t do so well at the Scary Movie series. I get all the references and jokes, sure, but it’s always a very painful kind of humor, as what they’re lampooning up there, it’s what I love, it’s the horror I hold s…
is the NYT bestselling author of 30 or so books, +350 stories, some comic books, and all this stuff here. He lives in Boulder, Colorado, and has a few broken-down old trucks, one PhD, and way too many boots. More