To Read: The Thirteenth Tale

While I don't necessarily like every gothic romance novel, I love the trappings that come with them: beatiful heroines, naïve governesses, old manor houses with abandoned wings and spooky grounds, creepy little girls, family secrets, and of course ghosts. Diane Setterfield's The Thirteenth Tale promises to incorporate all of those things in a story about a couple of writers. Sign me up.

News: 30 Days of Night Updates

A lot of 30 Days of Night progress in the last couple of weeks. Producer Robert Tapert has apparently found the perfect spot to shoot Barrow, Alaska. That's a shot of it there accompanying this post. I can already see the vampires making their way towards town across that snowfield.

Stunt coordinators are hard at work choreographing the vampire attack.

Josh Hartnett is starting to talk about the movie and is alienating fans by downplaying the horror elements. He also confirms that he's already in New Zealand working on the film.

And finally, Danny Huston (The Constant Gardener) has signed on to play "the leader" of the vampires. Don't know if that means he's playing Vincent or Marlowe though.

News: Sarah Connah?

So, there's talk about a Terminator TV-show called The Sarah Conner Chronicles. Executive Producer Josh Friedman promises a "pretty f*ing cool" show that balances close-ended stories with a longer, series-long metastory a la The X-Files. So far, so good.

Friedman's concerned that fans won't give the show a try if James Cameron's not involved, but I'm not sure that's what he needs to be worried about. If you've got a show with the name "Sarah Conner" in it, you'd better have Linda Hamilton playing her or a damn good replacement. (Top of my head, I'd buy Kate Beckinsale in the role.)

Project Update: FoN and "The Clearing"

Jason Copland and I are continuing to think about the title for our robots vs. monsters book. Forces of Nature just doesn't have the same kick to it that Robots vs. Monsters does. And after polling a bunch of people, we've learned that Robots vs. Monsters is the runaway favorite of potential readers everywhere. I'm still concerned that it sounds cliché, but we'd be foolish to ignore the feedback we got. I mean, it wasn't even close.

I just finished a short story called "The Clearing" that I'm going to submit to a comics anthology, assuming I can find the right artist to illustrate it. It's about an eight-year-old boy who follows an old, country road deep into the woods. And what he finds at the end of it.

Writing is Hard: Read your peas!

When I was a kid, I hated English peas. Still don't care for them a whole lot. But like many things in life, I was told that I needed to eat them because they were Good For Me. After all, a kid can't live on ice cream alone.

Same goes for reading. My pal Joe sent me a link to Jeanette Winterson's (Lighthousekeeping) website where she talks about what she likes to read.

"I'm an old-fashioned girl. That is, I'm on the side of Harold Bloom. Everybody should read the Canon of Western Literature, even if you don't accept it as canonical. For a reader, it's riches. For a writer, it's roots. A lot of modern work is rootless and shallow because the writer has no literary resources - nothing to draw on, in a way that is often unconscious."

I've got a book on my shelf called The Lifetime Reading Plan. It's as close a thing to an official Canon of Western Literature that you're going to get. It's a useful book and based on its recommendations, I've enriched my library with a lot of great literature by folks like Dostoevsky, Dickens, and the Brontës. I haven't read all of it, but it's there for me to get to one of these days.

My problem is that I grew up reading Edgar Rice Burroughs and Ian Fleming and never really grew out of those guys. Not to say that I don't read and appreciate "literature." I especially liked Jeffrey Eugenides' Middlesex, Elizabeth Moon's The Speed of Dark, and J. M. Coetzee's Disgrace. But if you look closely, you'll see that those books were all published about three years ago; about the time that I got caught up in S.J. Rozan mysteries and re-discovered Tarzan and Conan and quit reading peas. Turns out, I like ice cream a lot better than peas.

But Jeanette Winterson's advice is well-taken. We need to read stuff that's good for us. Sometimes, it can be a chore. It took me over a year to muddle through Ann Radcliffe's The Mysteries of Udolpho and I finally finished it out of sheer stubborness. I started it because it was an influential Gothic Romance; the genre that begat Horror. I wanted to study it and learn what about it influenced someone like Mary Shelley to write Frankenstein. I hope to God that I never write a book like it, but reading it gave me a better understanding of a genre that I enjoy writing in.

"Good for you" doesn't have to equal "yucky" though. Frankenstein is awesome. Dracula is awesome. Everything I've read by Charles Dickens has been awesome. Edgar Allen Poe is awesome. Alexandre Dumas and Victor Hugo and H.G. Wells are awesome. (Jules Verne and Isaac Asimov: not so awesome.) You're going to have a hard time getting me to read Aristotle or John Bunyan, but you're going to have an equally tough time getting me to check out Dan Brown or give Anne Rice another shot. So I guess "bad for you" doesn't necessarily equal "mmm, good" either. I'd rather eat fresh strawberries than rum raisin ice cream.

Where I disagree with Winterson is her encouragement to read the entire Canon of Western Literature. If a book's not doing it for you, I don't care how classic or "good for you" it is, life's too short to be spending time reading stuff you don't enjoy. Ann Radcliffe taught me that.

Review: Life on Mars

Over Labor Day weekend I marathoned my way into catching up with what BBC America's aired so far of Life on Mars. I'd watched the first half of the pilot a while back and wasn't sure if I was going to like it. I generally run out of patience with shows that have closed concepts like this one.

If you don't know what it is, it's about a police detective who's hit by a car in 2006 and wakes up in 1973. There's a lot of evidence that he's actually still in a coma and just imagining being back in time, but he can't understand the level of detail in his new world. The premise of the show is that if he figures out exactly what happened to him, he can get back to his own time.

The problem is that -- like The Prisoner or Gilligan's Island or Star Trek: Voyager -- you know that he's never going to figure it out and go home until the show's over. That gets old unless there's something else to keep you coming back every week. Take Lost, for instance, with its focus on the characters' pasts and relentless sense of mystery. You don't care if the characters never get home, so long as the island stays interesting.

Same with Life on Mars. I've been itching for years for the kind of detective show that I grew up watching as a kid. Something along the lines of Mannix or The Rockford Files or Magnum p.i. These days it's all C.S.I. and Law and Order, with the focus on the procedure rather than action and mystery. Because it takes place in the '70s, Life on Mars is exactly what I've been longing for. No computer models to re-enact crimes, no dusting skin for fingerprints, not even any cell phones to keep the police in constant contact with each other. And the genius of the show is that -- through Sam, our "time-travelling" detective -- it acknowledges that crime prevention in the '70s was archaic at the exact same time that it's embracing the fact. We're allowed to roll our eyes at it even as we thrill to the car chases and fist-fights.

Every episode, there's a little reminder that Sam's got a larger mystery to figure out, and we're gradually collecting pieces of information that will help us do that too. But like with Lost, I'm finding that I don't really care if he ever gets home. I don't want it to end.

Review: Frankenstein Unbound

Finishing up a recent Frankenstein binge, I watched Roger Corman's adaptation of Brian Aldiss' Frankenstein Unbound starring Raul Julia as Doctor Frankenstein, John Hurt as a time-traveling scientist with thematic similarities to the doomed scientist, and Bridget Fonda as Mary Shelley.

The special effects are what you'd expect from Corman, so we'll let those pass. We'll also let Bridget Fonda slide for being far prettier than the real Mary Shelley. My big gripes are with Raul Julia's overly sinister portrayal of Victor Frankenstein, and the presentation of the Monster as a stupid, homicidal brute. I've never read the book, so I'm not sure how much of that is Aldiss and how much is Corman; I just know it's not right.

I know why they did it. Julia's Frankenstein is a guy who's deliberately trying to play God, a theme that's often attributed to Shelley's novel. And the moronic Monster makes Frankenstein's bid for diety-status all the more pathetic. But Shelley did a fine job of communicating the folly of messing in God's territory in her version. She's just more subtle about it than Frankenstein Unbound.

Because I don't have a ton of respect for Corman, and Aldiss is an award-winning science fiction novelist, I'm tempted to give more blame to Corman. But then I remember that I was pretty disappointed by the one Aldiss book I've read, and I also notice that he wrote a sequel to Frankenstein Unbound called Dracula Unbound in which Hurt's character goes back in time again to stop Dracula from assassinating Bram Stoker before Stoker can finish writing his famous novel. I don't know why Aldiss has this fascination with using his hero to turn great authors into gonzo journalists, but I'm not into it.

Reviews: Genre comics

I'm trying to get caught up on comics reviews. To that end, I just posted a bunch of them at Comic World News.

Adventure Comics
The Black Coat: A Call to Arms #2-4
G.I. Joe: Sigma 6 #1
Casanova #1-2

Mystery Comics
Horrorwood #2
Koni Waves #1
X Isle #1
Witchblade #99

Horror Comics
Jack the Lantern: 1942
B.P.R.D.: The Universal Machine #3-4
Death Comes to Dillinger #1

To Read: Live Girls

When Bookgasm first reviewed Ray Garton's Live Girls, I dismissed the book. The plot sounds interesting (a reporter recruits a vampire in his effort to bring down the nosferatu-infested porn palace that was responsible for the death of the reporter's loved ones), but the review's description as "more over-the-top than anything approaching scary" lost me.

But when Ed Gorman says that Live Girls is one of two vampire novels (the other being 'Salem's Lot) that you can "put on the same shelf with Dracula and I Am Legend..." well then, Live Girls goes on my reading list.

News: Star Trek gets Lucas-ized

You'd think George Lucas had gotten ahold of Star Trek.

According to E! Online, Paramount announced last week that all 79 episodes of the original Star Trek series are going to be digitally remastered before heading back into syndication next month in time for the show's 40th anniversary. Not only that, but a lot of the special effects are going to be updated via CGI.

The Enterprise and all other spaceships will be computer generated (though the digital version of Kirk's ship will be based on the original model used for the show) and "battle sequences, ship exteriors, galaxy shots and landscapes (which previously came courtesy of matte paintings) will be given more shading, depth and computer-generated authenticity."

Michael Okuda, Star Trek's scenic-art guru for the last eighteen years, says that they're not trying to pull a Lucas on the series. "We're taking great pains to respect the integrity and style of the original," he says. "Our goal is to always ask ourselves: What would Roddenberry have done with today's technology?" Unfortunately, that's the exact same question that Lucas asked about himself as he started farting around with Star Wars.

On the other hand, the fact that Okuda and company are messing around with someone else's baby may make them more conservative about the changes they make. I'm actually pretty excited to see what they come up with. Watching the original series gets a little tiring when the same, vague blob of light is used to represent every alien spaceship the Enterprise encounters.

Now, let's see what we can do about getting a CGI Gorn.

Happy Tarzan Day!

Guess who would've turned 131 today?

No, not Tarzan, but you're close. Edgar Rice Burroughs, that's who.

Couple of things I didn't know about Burroughs: Tarzan of the Apes was inspired by Burrough's having read Darwin's Descent of Man, and for the first half of the last century, Burroughs was the most widely read author in America.