DailyNightmare
If you’re re-modeling your living room to be something a little less “living” you might consider this posh, hand-made “Coffin Couch.” It folds up completely too when not in use.
( http://www.etsy.com/view_listing.php?listing_id=26259374 )
I saw these shoes a few days ago and they have haunted my imagination, literally, ever since.
They appear to be a pair of standard, somewhat boring men’s shoes that are caught in the middle of transforming into werewolf feet.
(James Frederick Leach writes:) “My extremely short story Bent appears in the Summer Issue of Alien Skin Magazine. It’s a touching tale of young love that is also seriously twisted. Literally twisted. Oh, and it’s also exactly 150 words long.”
CORRECTED AUGUST 2009 – Summer’s over, evidently because the new issue of AlienSkin is live and my story is no longer on-line. I’ll see about posting it soon.
And they say print media is dead! A new nine chapter novella by Koji Suzuki (author of Ring) has recently been published… on rolls of toilet paper. The novella is titled Drop and allegedly takes up about three feet of toilet paper in its entirety. What I found particularly interesting is that the AP story alleges that ghost in Japan traditionally hide in bathrooms.
Japanese Novella printed on Toilet Paper http://news.aol.com/article/scary-toilet-paper/496694#Comments
“We knew not a soul and frankly, didn’t know what to expect from such a convention but the other attendees made us feel right at home”
James Frederick Leach (the Grim Gnome’s alter-ego) says: Mrs Gnome and I are just back from MoConIV in Indianapolis. It was a friendly horror writer’s convention held in a church basement, jointly sponsored by the Indiana Horror Writers and The Dwelling Place, a local church. We knew not a soul and frankly, didn’t know what to expect from such a convention but the other attendees made us feel right at home. “Google-goggle one of us. We accept you. We accept you. One of us!” I read some of my shorter pieces at the Friday night poetry reading and no one booed me off the stage. I also got a chance to sip absinthe… from a Spongebob dixie cup! I left with an armful of books and a lot of good memories.
I wrote a 550-word article about the convention that appears over at Read The Spirit today if you’re curious.
These are the sites of as many of the folks I met at MoCon as I can remember:
• Tom Piccirilli (http://www.tompiccirilli.com/)
Tom’s work has been nominated for several Stoker awards and an Edgar. My favorite line from him this weekend was “Easy reading is damn hard writing.” Amen to that, brother. He inscribed my copy Welcome to Hell: A Working Guide for the Beginning Writer (Fairwood Press, 200) – his friendly but candid introduction to the writing life – with the immensely encouraging note “Your stories kick ass.” Another good book by him, this one fiction, is A Choir of Ill Children (Bantam, 2004)
Welcome to Hell : A Working Guide for the Beginning Writer
A Choir of Ill Children
• Linda Addison (http://www.cith.org/linda/)
Linda organized the poetry reading on Friday night and she most recently published Being Full of Light, Insubstantial (Space and Time, 2007) Her work has won the Stoker award.
Being Full of Light, Insubstantial
• Gerard Houarner (http://www.cith.org/gerard/)
In addition to being an accomplished fiction writer, Gerard also is the fiction editor for Space and Time Magazine (http://spaceandtimemagazine.com/wp/)
• Wrath James White (http://wordsofwrath.blogspot.com/)
Wrath is an unforgettable person from both his magnetic personality and formidable physical presence. Oh, and he’s quite a writer too. His most recent work Succulent Prey (Leisure, 2008) marks his mass market debut. Succulent Prey (Leisure Fiction)
• Maurice Broaddus (http://mauricebroaddus.com/)
Maurice put the “Mo” in MoCon. His most recent novella, The Devil’s Marionette (Shroud, 2009) debuted at the convention
Devil’s Marionette
• Steven Gilberts (http://stevengilberts.com/)
For a couple decades, Steven’s illustrations have graced the covers of various works of speculative fiction. I bought a very reasonably priced print of his that depicts a slightly open door with a mob of sharp toothed, swollen headed beasties swarming out. Seemed like a good metaphor for artistic inspiration cause when one of those little buggers bit into you, there’d be no getting it off until it’s finished.
Other folks I met include:
• Jason Sizemore (http://www.apexbookcompany.com/)
• Alethea Kontis (http://aletheakontis.com/)
• Kelli Dunlap (http://kellidunlap.com/)
• Bob Freeman (http://authorbobfreeman.wordpress.com/)
And wow, lots of other folks whose names are eluding me at this moment. Good times. Good people.
I bet this one slipped by the leftist media cultural elitists:
Man Bites and Chews Off Part of Another Man’s Arm!
Much of the commentary that’s appeared on the blogosphere surrounding this event assumes that the attacker was a zombie. OK, fine, fair enough. I see the resemblance at least to the early Romero-style zombies. Some nit-picking kill-joys were hung up on the fact that the attacker didn’t go for the guy’s brains.
But let’s back up for a moment. It’s it terrifying enough to think that this guy came up out of nowhere and bit a chunk out of someone’s arm? Isn’t it even a bit creepier in fact that the guy WASN’T a zombie?
You’re probably thinking something along the line of Gojira-jerky or freeze-dried Gamera but these little darlings, found over at Pinktentacle.com are 10,000 times cooler.
Those familiar with cryptozoological frauds like the fiji-mermaid know the drill. Many of these wonders are fabricated from various parts of various critters. Others have a more obscure provenance and some, like the “living mummy” tradition of certain monastic orders are even weirder. All in all this is a post you’ve got to read — though it left me feeling oddly thirsty.
In honor of Friday the 13th, I wanted to treat all you trixodecaphobes to something kind of sweet. My son and grand-daughter were doodling the other day and happened to come up with some very happy bats. I thought they were delightful, especially for the colors they chose to depict these children of the night. Am I the only one who’s getting a little bored of scary things having a dreary color pallette? These are happy, cheery little bats who are smiling, perhaps because they’ve just feasted on the blood of some paisley-wearing hippy.
Are we getting excited yet? The 200th anniversary of Edgar Allen Poe’s birth is coming up on the 19th. I suspect I’ll mark the occasion by relaxing with a nice Amantillado and perhaps page through some quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore. After of course I’ve entombed a love one or acquaintance beneath the floor boards.
Or I might track down the web premiere of this rather intriguing independent film “Poe: Last Days of the Raven.” Check out the trailer on Youtube:
Or check out the website for the film, Last Days of the Raven where they allege there will be a free web premiere of the film. Hope their servers can support the traffic.
Seriously, I really DO hope they pull this off because I really rather want to see this effort. The trailer looks nicely shot and for the most part tastefully assembled. Granted not all fan-produced features are as satisfying as their trailers… Ok no point being coy. I’ll come out and say it, the Call of Cthulu movie by the H.P.Lovecraft Historical Society was… well, rather embarrassing while the trailer was delightful. Sure the movie gets great credit for moxie and perseverance, heck even its art direction (those cultic statues are just SO COOL.) And probably it’s significant somehow in the history of low/no budget horror. But as a movie it’s only going to be intelligible let alone enjoyable to someone who’s already familiar with the story. It failed, I think, by being too reverent with the source material. Those nested flashbacks within flashbacks just did not work for me in the context of a relatively feature length movie. The trailer, however, remains a sparkling acheivement of mood and style. May their upcoming filmic projects better fulfill the promise of this little gem:
Something roams the wild places down by the Sabine River, something mysterious, something murderous in Joe R. Landale’s novel The Bottoms. The book, a fictional memoir, is a joy to read, by turns suspenseful and horrific, wry and at times melancholic. It’s a well-crafted piece by an accomplished master every bit deserving of the Edgar Award it won in 2000.
In The Bottoms, Harry Collins recounts events that happened to him during his Depression-era boyhood in East Texas after he discovered the body of a woman murdered by a serial killer. One by one, more bodies are found, each bound and mutilated. Harry’s father is the constable to the area which allows him privileged access to information about the killer. Woven into this coming of age tale are local legends about a Goat Man who’s sold his soul, the curious wonders of sexuality as well as the dizzying terror of entrenched racial hatred.
The book is clearly the work of a craftsman. On every page there are one or two sentences that are simply and elegantly phrased. The pacing of the narrative is smooth and I was able to relax as I read, knowing that there would be no surface irritations to disturb the ride. If anything, the ride was a bit too smooth for my tastes, as if all the rough edges had been sanded flat even if some mysteries remain unsolved. This observation is hardly a criticism since the tone and scope perfectly fit the conceit that these are the well-considered reflections of a man late in life.
My only quibble really was a slight touch of what I’d call white-man’s-burden-ism. I’m a Yankee and we suffer from our own forms of entrenched racism so I don’t presume to speak from some morally superior position. I’m just left extremely curious about what the black community depicted in the novel would have done to protect itself from a serial killer. Lansdale does an admirable job of providing plausible insights into this world and granted, since Harry’s father is constable, the novel is weighted toward official (i.e. white) justice. Still, I’m left curious even though I realize that this curiosity is probably an unfair expectation to put on any memoir.
The Bottoms is well worth reading, especially if you enjoy tales of sex murders, satannic Goat men and hooded night riders. It deals rather intelligently with that time of life when we realize we’re living in a world of wonders and horrors and that people we respect sometimes respond to that world in less than respectable ways. Take it to the beach with you instead of that other cookie-cutter mystery novel.
Digging where, exactly?
http://www.cbc.ca/canada/ottawa/story/2008/10/14/cemetery-death.html
Daughter Of Hounds
Daughter Of Hounds
— the grim gnome
Occasionally, I’ll happen upon indications that the human species isn’t doomed. For instance, the bright minds behind the Zombie Squad are preparing for the zombie uprising *now* while there’s still time. For those who remain skeptical of the zombie menace, only because it hasn’t yet reached epidemic proportions, the Zombie Squad also performs acts of contemporary assistance, particularly disaster relief. I’m serious. They have canned food drives, donate blood (their own, presumably) in addition to having occasional movie nights. There are several chapters across the US and Ontario and it sounds like other chapters are forming.
This industrious designer takes parts from old motorcycles and creates these wonderfully strange end tables. They highly resemble the bio-mechanoid fantasies of H.R. Giger.
Rush over to the Classic Tales Podcast and pick up the first part of H.P.Lovecraft’s “The Lurking Fear.” The reader and proprietor of the site, B.J.Harrison has a suitably dramatic style of presentation that works especially well with Lovecraft’s luridly over-written prose. You might also want to subscribe to the Classic Tales as well, since in past months several nightmarish titles have appeared. They include delicious chestnuts as “Berenice” by Poe, “The Vampyr” by Polidori and “The Horla” by deMaupassant, etc. If you miss them in the (free) feed, all of the audio books are available for purchase.
When I was a kid, before the birth of syndicated talk shows, one of the local networks ran something called “The 4:00 Movie.” A movie could be hacked to bits, pumped full of commercials and still get over in time for “The News.” Periodically, there would be a whole week of giant monster movies (Gamera and Mothra were my favorites.) And this meant that you could get home from school — if you didn’t fiddle around TOO much in the playground — in time to watch the “whole” movie. Two movies it seems like they were ALWAYS showing on the 4:00 Movie were “Whatever Happened to Baby Jane” and “Hush, Hush Sweet Charlotte.” My pre-teen estimation of them was “bo-o-oring.”
But I’ve just seen both of those movies again, uncut, as an adult, and I think they’d make a dandy “Creature Double Feature.”
“Sweet Charlotte” features just about every thing we white Yankees fear about the South — that it’s a place of decaying plantations, murder, hysteria and small-minded small-town-ers with bad accents. It was “A Rose for Emily” ground-up and mixed with a pastiche of Tennesee Williams. On top of that, I find the title virtually impossible to say out loud. But it’s delicious too. I cut Joseph Cotton so much slack not because he’s a great actor, which of course he was, but because he always looked so suave. He doesn’t even look like an ass while he’s lip-syncing the utterly vapid “theme song.” And it has a nice mood of decrepitude and a few good runs at, albeit slightly overwrought, suspense.
The ideal double feature for “Sweet Charlotte” is the far superior, “Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?” In addition to being in black and white, the obvious link between these movies is Bette Davis. I’m sure writers more observant than myself have remarked how intriguing the choices she made late in her career, when her beauty faded and allowed her acting abilities to come to the fore. It’s really gutsy to play parts where, well, where you KNOW folks are going to hate you. Forget the clunky prologue that really doesn’t explain much and the “surprise” ending; the meat of the movie is the tortured interplay between the two sisters, both of whom have had their time in the spotlight, a time long past. It’s a great set up full of nasty psychological torture and suspense, one that would even work as a stage play, I think, and Davis and Joan Crawford play it for all it’s worth.
Watch ’em together, perhaps while sipping a mint julep on the veranda.
From time to time, Mrs. Grimgnome is a doctor trapped inside a zombie-plagued town. She travels from building to building, in constant communication with a larger coalition of do-good-ing humans, trying to thwart the zombie menace. My dear wife, you see, is nearly addicted to a free on-line massively multi-player game called “Urban Dead.”
The game is basic, almost simplistic and easily overlooked by those thumb-twitching game-fiends who need flashy graphics to keep their attention. Since it’s web-based – and I know this isn’t unique to Urban Dead – it can be played on ANY computer that can traverse the Weird Wild Web which is refreshing in this era where games frequently require a platform upgrade. The game field is a three by three grid that represents the buildings and areas a player can see out of a relatively large city of Malton. (The Powers-That-Be prudently sealed off Malton shortly after the zombie’s started rising, y’know, to make sure things didn’t get REALLY out of hand.) Details about these areas appear in text and can be enhanced by certain objects, for instance binoculars. But only human players can use objects. Oh yes. In Urban Dead, players can also be zombies. In fact, human players turn into zombies when they are killed. And for that matter, zombies can be turned back into humans at “Revive Points”.
Since the object of the game is ongoing and so broadly construed, player groups have formed with other goals, some extremely idiosyncratic. Some are simple “neighborhood watch” type groups that keep the zombies out. There are zombie-based groups even that try to organize their destruction or give it a peculiar slant. One group, as I remember it, were scholars in life and hence they refuse to kill anyone found in a library, museum or school. A nice twist on the cliched zombie rally call “Brains!” These groups run their own websites that as far as I can see have no connection whatsoever to Kevan Davis, the guy behind Urban Dead. My wife’s group even appears to have a Firefox plugin that allows players to identify other group members in crowds as well as to track other kinds of information. They help each other, patrol their neighborhood of Malton, co-ordinate raids, heck, they might even have raves and tea-parties for all I know.
Kevan Davis keeps the site fun too with upgrades and special limited time events. For instance, on Hallowe’en for one day only, there were trick or treaters out, some wearing costumes, some knocking on heavily barricaded door for the stale candy that was available that day only from mall stores. Weird. But weirdly fun.
There is a relatively detailed WIKI for the game that can be found at:
http://wiki.urbandead.com/index.php/Main_Page
Last year for Christmas, Mrs. Grimgnome got an Urban Dead t-shirt which she loves DEARLY, wears constantly — and washes occasionally. Get one for someone you love.
I picked up these hand-drawn match books at an “Alternative Art Fair” a couple months ago in Ypsilanti, MI and ever since then I have regretted that I didn’t buy more. Each matchbook features a different, hand drawn “Smokin’ Zombie.” They’re the work of the artist Sean Bieri who has a blog over here at: The Man Who Japed. He does LOTS of cool stuff and is a member of HATCH, a collective of artists in Hamtramck that also does lots of cool stuff that I’d like to plug but to be honest the zombie matchbooks are the only things that are really nightmare-related. The HATCH table is one that I ALWAYS hit at the Alternative Art Fair.
I’m no longer a smoker but I’ve got lots of friends who are and I think these little gems would make great things to sort of slip in their coat pockets… if I had just bought them by the HANDFUL.
As a kid, I preferred the Addams Family to The Munsters but you’ve got to admit that the the cars that the Munsters drove were pretty cool. Here is a papercraft version of the Barris designed Munster Koach. The guy who turned this car into a paper model has a link for donations so send him a buck or two. The model is quite fantastic.
Ravensblight.com is a fun, well-conceived and executed concept website that takes as its central metaphor a haunted town. The MOST fun part for me at least was the “Toystore” which features a couple DOZEN creepy papercraft models to print out and build.
Papercraft for those not familiar with it is a craft somewhat similar to origami in that you start with a flat sheet of paper and you end up with a three-dimensional object. But since the “rules” of papercraft allow scissors and elaborately printed paper, the object are — to be blunt– WAY cooler than origami. The technique behind papercraft is a pretty cool mixture of high-tech and low-tech. High tech computer-aided-design tools are used to create 3-d models of things… in Ravensblight’s case, for instance, mechanical bats or the tiny coffins shown above. Then another program “unfolds” the object into a 2-d surface and saves it as a .pdf. From a crafter’s perspective, it’s all low-tech simple: all you have to do is download the .pdf’s, print them with a color printer ideally on stiff paper and assemble. It’s a great rainy day activity and heck it’s a blast to have a little line of coffins on your desk!
