We Who Watch Behind The Rows: Graveyard Shift (1990) Pt. 1

Welcome to our first installment of We Who Watch Behind the Rows: Stephen King Print vs. Film. The focus of this new column is to compare the written works of author Stephen King against the numerous adaptations made for either the movie or television screen. Since there are what seems to be about 4,000 such adaptations released into the wild to this point, we expect catching up with all of them will take a good amount of time on our parts.

As with our other semi-regular column -- Visiting and Revisiting -- your hosts are myself, Rik Tod Johnson of The Cinema 4 Pylon and Cinema 4: Cel Bloc websites, and Aaron Lowe of the Working Dead Productions website. We are both hardcore, longtime cinema fans, but we are also, to varying degrees, big Stephen King fans. 

The difference between us is that I, after following King earnestly and faithfully around every turn in his career since I first read The Dead Zone around 1981, largely gave up on his writing (with a couple of notable exceptions) post-Gerald's Game (that would be around 1992). So with this project, I will basically begin my personal reintroduction to each of King's stories and novels as we make our way through his oeuvre.

Aaron, what is your personal experience with the written works of Mr. King?

Lllllllaadies...

Aaron: I actually started reading Stephen King and stopped reading Stephen King around the same time. I read my first novel from him in 1990, when I was in 6th grade, and I more or less stopped following his career post-1992. That isn't to say I stopped reading King after those two years; no far from it. By the time I came on board, Stephen King had twenty-three novels and five story collections in print, which means I had a wealth of material to dive into. It also means that, much like you, I stopped keeping current with him sometime around Gerald's Game. There were a few exceptions to that, when I would get gifts from relatives who knew I liked Stephen King and not much else about me, but for the most part I fell out of touch with him once I'd caught up, and didn't start buying his novels again until Black House (2001). That may not seem like a lot of time to not be reading Stephen King, but it means that I missed seven novels that I still haven’t caught up with.

Along with reading Stephen King, I was watching his movies nearly constantly. I was a child of the video age, and it seemed as if nearly everything King had written had become a movie or short film or episode of some anthology horror show. There were four filmed adaptations in the year I began reading him, and the world was entering a golden age of Stephen King television, with mini-series versions of some of his biggest books (and, ahem, The Langoliers). It’s certainly no coincidence that I first became acquainted with Mr. King at this point in time.

I’ve pretty much reached the point where I’m back to looking forward to each Stephen King novel or story collection with quite a bit of low-key excitement. It’s no longer a pressing issue to buy the latest King novel as soon as I see it, since he still has one or two books come out a year, but every birthday or Christmas the first thing I use my gift cards on is whatever his latest offering happens to be. And I can say honestly; I’ve never not enjoyed a Stephen King novel. Even a King novel I end up disliking on the whole entertains me and speaks to me in such a way that I never feel like I’ve wasted my time on it. Whatever the outcome, I always enjoy the experience of reading Stephen King’s prose.

Rik: Since rereading each novel takes a bit more time, we have decided to jumpstart We Who Watch Behind the Rows by reviewing the varied pieces in King's 1978 short story collection, Night Shift. From the twenty stories in Night Shift, there have been eight feature films and four television adaptations made thus far. Of the remaining stories in the collection, most (but not quite all) have been adapted into short, amateur films known by King and his fans as "Dollar Babies". Overall, this gives us quite a surplus from which to begin.

The Story: Graveyard Shift [Night Shift, 1978; first published in the October 1970 issue of Cavalier magazine]

Original Cavalier appearance of the story 

Aaron: I’m not entirely sure when I first read the Night Shift collection, but it would have been in the early nineties as I was in the midst of my full-blown King obsession. I remember reading other stories from the collection in the back of my uncle’s pickup truck on a family camping trip, but Graveyard Shift kind of melds into the pile of stories I was reading at the time. There are a few tales in this collection that I have some fairly strong sense memories of where I was when I read them, but Graveyard Shift isn’t one of those. It’s not that the story is bad or lackluster, it’s just that it lacks a central image as striking as that of Grey Matter or I Am the Doorway (the latter of which inspired the cover of the paperback in which I first read these stories).

At its heart, Graveyard Shift is a simple, straightforward, grisly little shocker equally inspired by Poe and EC Comics. That’s not to say it’s derivative or unenjoyable. Quite the contrary; this is an economic, fun shock story that I’ve read through twice now in a short time period and enjoyed each time. Stephen King would, in just a few years, be known for epic, encyclopedia-sized books, and he himself would self-deprecatingly discuss his tendency to ramble on and on and on. But this collection proves that he was just as adept at sketching in characters that seem fully realized within the span of only a handful of pages, and possibly only a couple of lines of action. It’s true that most of the characters in this story are basically background, given only a name or a single line of dialogue, but a few of them become living, breathing characters on the page in a very short span.

I have quite a few friends who only really like Stephen King’s short stories, and avoid his novels. While I don’t agree with that stance, clearly, it’s one that I can understand. His short stories tend to be swifter, nastier, and stranger than his novels. It’s almost as if he lets his imagination run wild for a dozen pages or so and puts no restrictions on his concepts, no matter how bizarre or unsettling, while his novels tend to rein things in a little bit. Also, one thing I discovered early on: Stephen King loves a happy ending. With very few exceptions his long form work (novels or novellas) end with a positive outcome, whereas his short stories have no such assurances. In a Stephen King short story, all bets are off, and no one is safe.

How about you? Where do you stand on this divide? Do you prefer his short stories to his novels, or are you a fan of each in equal measure? How did you feel about his ability here to sketch in a believable world within 26 pages?

Rik: Until I reread Children of the Corn in this same collection a few months ago, it had been so long since I had read any of King’s short stories that I forgot just how economical he could be in his writing. Part of why I started to have a falling out with him is that I felt that he had grown too much in love with his voice, and that voice had definitely developed a rambling tic that I found somewhat annoying, and therefore rendered King a chore to read at times. He had also started to veer slightly away from the supernatural around the time of Dolores Claiborne and Gerald’s Game, and I was mostly uninterested in the topics he was starting to explore. Even when he touched on the supernatural in that mid-‘90s period – such as in Insomnia or Rose Madder – I couldn’t muster much excitement. I read the first couple of chapters of each and gave up. And for the novels leading up to that period, his record was hit or miss with me; mostly miss really. I did not like The Eyes of the Dragon, The Tommyknockers, or Needful Things. While I was a big fan of most of his early novels (especially The Stand and The Dead Zone), the last novel of his that I really liked was The Dark Half.

But his short stories? Loved them. The tales in both Night Shift and The Skeleton Crew were constant re-reads for me throughout the ‘80s and into the ‘90s; likewise for his classic novella collection, Different Seasons. It was thrilling in those days that so many of these pieces were being made into films in theatres and on television as well, even if the quality varied greatly from project to project. But perhaps it is telling that his ‘90s work in the short story and novella area also failed to grab my attention as well. I liked Nightmares and Dreamscapes well enough; I read through it a couple of times, and some stories, like The Night Flier, really stuck with me. But I really did not enjoy Four Past Midnight all that much, so maybe that is where my real ennui with King started to set in for me.

The beauty of the short story is in its succinctness, in the sparing of details unnecessary to the moment at hand. In those early collections, King is brilliant in keeping a tight grip on information, his pen is sharp and concise, and he even seems to practice a form of subtlety – no matter how fantastical the situations, characters, or creatures – that would run away from him sometimes in his longer novels. Since I have rarely read King in recent years (and that would almost entirely be non-fiction and his pop culture columns in Entertainment Weekly), I don’t know if I would still perceive this problem with him.

Just like you, my friends and I – many of whom were also massive fans of King in those bygone days (I am unsure if any of them still read him; many were having a similar falling out with his ‘90s work) – had many discussions regarding “short stories vs. novels.” The short stories usually came out on top about two-thirds of the time. While I did love many of his early novels, I too ran with the short story crowd. And I would have to say that I am probably still with that group today.

Without diving fully into the actual movie version of Graveyard Shift until a bit further on in this discussion, I must admit that my initial re-read of the short story was colored by the fact that I did my re-watch of the film first. (I will not do this with future installments of this column.) Although only two characters truly bear the same name and gender (more on this later), I kept hearing the dialogue in the voices of the actors in the film, one actor (Stephen Macht) in particular. Did you have this problem, or did you do the smart thing and read the story first? If not, were you able to divorce yourself from the screen experience enough to enjoy the story without being influenced by the film?

UK Poster

Aaron: My process went like this; I read the short story, and then watched the film. A few days later I read the story again in preparation of writing this article. I have to say that’s probably the path I’ll be taking from here on out, as it provided me with a few neat insights into both. In fact, I’d like to try and watch the movie one more time before we truly wrap this thing up, and may end up doing so. One thing that I noticed on my second reading of Graveyard Shift (which would actually be the third or fourth lifetime read for me) is how much the film actually stuck to the brief descriptions in the story. We’ll get into the film later, of course, but almost every word Stephen King wrote found some form of representation in the filmed version in one way or another.

The story takes place in just under one week, divided into short sections, each covering one night on the titular graveyard shift as a crew of textile mill workers cleans out a disused basement. Though the narrator is omniscient, the focus of Graveyard Shift is Hall, a college dropout who has been drifting around the country taking odd jobs and searching for something in his life. The only other character of real note is Warwick, the foreman of the textile mill who seems threatened by Hall’s youth and college background. Warwick is the character Stephen Macht plays, and at the risk of getting ahead of myself, I felt that he was the best at capturing the flavor of the character as written. A few of the other mill workers have lines here or there, like Wisconsky or Ippeston, but they’re basically background characters, extras in this story.

Right away, King introduces a stylistic flourish that will eventually become a trademark: grounding his story in the mundane details of everyday life while introducing characters that speak in exaggerated vernacular. The details of the mill are made more real through King’s use of actual product names or pop culture references. The Orange Crush thermometer that Hall keeps checking, or the cans of Nehi that he throws at the rats. There’s no reason for King to point out that the thermometer is a promotional item from Orange Crush, nor that the aluminum cans Hall launches are Nehi, yet doing so gives the story a quick jolt of verisimilitude. We recognize these items from our own lives, and it places this story directly within our understanding.

King also has his characters speak in a weirdly poetic, often stilted, frequently profane style. He claims this language came from his youth surrounded by older blue collar New Englanders, and yet I have a feeling no one actually spoke like he writes. Like when Carmichael gets bitten by a large rat, and complains that he wants compensation, Warwick’s response is “Sure. You got bit on the titty.” This isn’t the most outrageous example in his bibliography, but you get the point. King himself has credited most of his success to this simple act of having his characters say bizarre, distinctive things.

I think Graveyard Shift turned out to be an unexpectedly subtle way to start this project. It features a lot of things Stephen King is known for, but toned way down to the point where it would be easy to miss them. Reading ahead in this collection (though skipping for now the ones we’ll eventually cover for this series) I can say that his stylistic tics become more pronounced the further along we go. Have you read ahead yet? What do you think of his penchant for cultural references and idiosyncratic dialogue? Anything else in the story we should cover before jumping into the film?

DVD Cover

Rik: I only read ahead through the next story, Night Surf, but that was because I remembered that it is connected to The Stand (the use of the Captain Trips influenza as a device), and I loved The Stand. (As to whether I still do, that remains to be seen for future columns.) It was amazing to me how I had almost completely forgotten the story over the intervening years, but the second that I started to read the story, details came flooding back into my head mere sentences before I happened upon them on the page (or really, on the screen, since I was reading it on my iPhone).

We had three constant battles in my gang when we seemed to be group reading King’s latest book back in the day. (Many of us worked for the same bookstore chain, so we were able to get discounted copies of each release, and thus nobody really had to wait to read each one.) One battle was over the overtness of his use of sexuality in his stories, and by that, I mean his descriptiveness and openness. (We had a couple of people in our group who felt he went a little bit too far with the details and sordidness in some scenes, and others, like – ahem -- me, are pervos who felt he never went far enough.) (That I ultimately found happiness in the far sicker and gooier writings of Clive Barker is no surprise.) The second battle was indeed about his use of product placement to sell the reality of his settings to the reader. Certainly he wasn’t getting paid to use any of these trademark names, and I agree with you that it made his stories seem like they were taking place exactly within our own dimension. We again had a couple of dissenters, who felt that it actually cheapened his writing, as if he were taking shortcuts instead of relying more fully on his imagination to set a scene. I saw their side of it as well, but overall, felt that King’s concentration on Nehi and other brands is part of what made him popular: his ability to make us imagine ourselves in his outrageous scenarios.

Such scenarios might even make us say the most outlandish things in the midst of trying to stay alive. That third battle was most certainly over his dialogue. I have always been torn on it myself, but he certainly makes his characters more memorable by his use of it. His characters sometimes employ the most ridiculous, out of left field wording, but King generally gets away with it. While the words may not jibe with our own understanding of the English language, you definitely can’t forget those characters.

In the case of the most egregious user of such language in the story version of Graveyard Shift – the foreman Warwick – he is definitely memorable, though that doesn’t excuse him from how profoundly (and purposefully) annoying he is. Warwick speaks in a manner that I could only proscribe to Stephen King; I have never met anyone in real life who converses as he does, at least when combined with an inability to even attempt to relate to anything living thing on even the smallest level. I will save any discussion of his movie counterpart until the appropriate section of this article. Taking the written Warwick as is, he is probably one of the best examples of how far King was willing to take a character into the realm of the completely unlikable.

Look, I’ve never been to Maine, and I probably will never go there. I am not knocking the state, but I grew up in Alaska, so there is not much in Maine that I can’t get by just going back home for a visit. And I am allergic to shellfish, so in a gastronomic sense, why would I even? Nor have I ever met (to my knowledge) anybody directly from Maine, so I have zero experience in any actual dialect from that state. What has always struck me in the King adaptations (when they stick to that region) is how phony the dialogue sounds to my ear. Period. No one speaks like that at all, I tell myself, and the overriding effect has been that if there is a feature of pure artifice to King’s stories, it is not the fantastical creatures that never have or never will be in this world, but the words that fall from his most annoying characters mouths and the odd angles at which those words hit my ears.

This is not to say that I don’t enjoy some of those words. I find their use annoying, but at no point would I admit that King doesn’t achieve the exact goals for which he is striving. When I saw George A. Romero’s (and King’s) Creepshow in the theatre for the first time in 1982, and saw King on the screen as the doomed Jordy Verrill – or even in his cameo role as a loudmouth spectator in Romero’s earlier but equally fascinating Knightriders -- I got the sense (apart from King being a shitty actor) that in his head, all of King’s characters spoke within those parameters – as annoying as possible and with accents so outrageous they may as well be the “Frenchies” in Monty Python.

Of course, I exaggerate – as King does as well -- and it does bring me to my point. I can say “No one speaks like that in real life!” but what do I know? Right down the street, in any direction, there are groups and nationalities and subgroups and cultures that speak to each in ways that I have never heard. Nor am I likely to hear if I don’t immerse myself in their cultures. I am no expert on anything. Do I know anyone from the backwoods or small towns of Maine? No. So how can I say that Warwick doesn’t exist somewhere, and that people just like Warwick influenced King? I cannot know. It doesn’t mean that I have to accept every frustratingly odd piece of dialogue, but I will give King the benefit of the doubt in most cases.

There is some memorable imagery in Graveyard Shift – such as King’s vivid descriptions of the mutated creatures –but the one that gets my mind racing is the lock on the underside – yes, the underside – of the trapdoor that is discovered, which will eventually lead to a hidden sub-basement and much carnage by the end of the story (and possibly portends more carnage post-story). The rusted lock is a marvelous tension builder, and the “hero” character, Hall, seems to revel in its discovery, if only because it helps continue to cut through Warwick’s blusterous façade of toughness. Trying to fathom exactly what purpose led to its necessity almost distracts me from the exploration of the dank subbasement and the mutant rat-bat action that occurs next. Did the lock perform similar black magic on you? What other imagery stuck in your memory the most?

Aaron: Definitely the lock is the big, glaring, flashing light at the center of this story. It hints at something grander and stranger than the inbred, mutant rat action we get. At first glance it seems like an early example of yet another Stephen King tic; the offhand remark or briefly mentioned artifact that hints at an older, more horrific story only tangentially related to what we’re seeing. Eventually those digressions would get the best of him, and Stephen King would devote hundreds of pages to ideas that were only really incidental to the main plot, but I’ve always loved them. Even when they threatened to overload the main story, my favorite parts of King books tend to be the brief (or not-so-brief) detours that give the impression that the world is weirder and scarier than you thought. Right now I’m going to take a page out of Stephen King’s book and back up a bit and work my way back to answer your question.

On my first re-reading of this story, I felt the ending had a few rushed elements. After some pretty leisurely storytelling, and without much foreshadowing, the ending comes rushing at us in just a couple of quick pages. Warwick and Hall seem to undergo some pretty major shifts in personality, and Hall in particular gets a new motivation that seems to come out of left field. I’m speaking, of course, of Hall’s decision to not just force Warwick into a rat infested basement in order to prove his aggressive blustering is merely a show, but to actually take an active role in Warwick’s death as almost a sacrifice to the rats.

As soon as Warwick and Hall enter the sub-basement, Hall’s entire attitude changes. Where earlier in the story he had been silently acquiescing to Warwick’s demands and insults (though often with some passive aggression), here he begins to take charge of the situation, to badger and harass Warwick openly. His inner thoughts change as well, as he begins to feel a wild elation, ‘something lunatic and dark with colors.’ He feels a sense of purpose drawing him on, and his inner thoughts remark that ‘he had perhaps been looking for something like this through all his days of crazy wandering.’ This change happens so suddenly, over barely a page, that at first blush it seemed unearned. Then, when re-reading the story it all fell into place; of course Hall was unmoored and probably a little unhinged, despite his seeming sanity at the story’s outset. And of course a drifter who seems to be searching for his place in the world would find something almost religious in the mystery and violence of what happens in that sub-basement.

Which brings us back to that lock on the underside of a trap door. Why would it be there, on that side of the door? The characters in the story all wonder this, but it’s glossed over rather quickly. As I see it there is only one real reason you would lock the inside of something; you are locking yourself in and something else out. Based on the disused nature of the basement, and the certainly even more disused nature of the sub-basement, neglected for decades, who could have set that lock? And what must their rationale have been? How could anyone with even the barest sense of curiosity not be tempted down those stairs?

But there’s more to this mystery, and although we never get a definitive answer we get a lot of weird clues. First off is the basement itself, which is ancient and full of weird fungi the characters have never seen before, strange and swarming beetles, and of course giant rats and bats. The basement is also larger than the mill that lays on top of it, extending past the mill’s borders, and we get explicit evidence that the basement might predate the above structure by several decades. Warwick and Hall discover a large wooden box with a name and date painted on it; “Elias Varney, 1841.” At the discovery of that item, Hall asks Warwick if the mill is that old, to which Warwick answers that the mill was built in 1897.

In the sub-basement Warwick and Hall find one skeleton, and though no connection is made in the text, I think it’s a fair assumption to make that the skeleton belonged to whoever locked the basement from the inside. I think another assumption could also be made that the skeleton and Elias Varney are one and the same. So now the question remains, who is Elias Varney? I’m going to get a bit extra-textual here, and go outside of the book for a theory I’d like to put forward.

Knowing how much Stephen King likes to make allusions to his own works I went online to look up any other instances of an Elias Varney in his work, or even just another Varney, and could find nothing (Stephen King fans have tirelessly plotted most story connections throughout several websites, so if a connection existed I should have found it). What I did find, buried in a forum thread from ages ago, was the idea that the name meant nothing in and of itself, it was just there to identify the skeleton, and perhaps Varney had been chosen because King is a ravenous fan of horror literature, and wanted to give a shout out to Varney the Vampire, the first English-language vampire tale.

But what if the naming wasn’t random? What if it was a clue to the very origins of the story? The wooden box they find isn’t really described, other than it is apparently huge, but what if it was a coffin? What if Elias Varney is related to Francis Varney, the titular vampire of that story? Or, what if he had nothing to do with that story and was simply a clue as to the nature of the trouble beneath the mill. There are a couple ways it could go from there. This vampire had sealed himself away from the dangerous humans above, or perhaps this Varney was as self-hating as the original, and had sealed himself away to keep humanity safe. Either way, it’s clear that he died beneath what would eventually become a textile mill.

Now, I’m not saying that I’ve solved a mystery in a 26-page Stephen King story that no one had ever even noticed before, and I’m not saying that King wrote a secret sequel to a half forgotten penny dreadful from over a century earlier, but it does serve to highlight what I love most about short stories like this; the idea that there is a larger world and we are looking at it through a keyhole. In this case we’ve got Elias Varney, who may or may not be a vampire, but who has locked himself away in an ancient cavern that ends up full of mutated rats, bats, and other forms of life normally found in caves. Did he lock himself up before or after this change in the natural order? Did he do it because of the change? Did the change happen because of him? We’ll never know, and whether you want to buy my version of things or not, I think it’s a fun way to look at the story, and it got my imagination whirring.

Rik: I am willing to entertain the notion, though I really think King never meant anything more than simple literary name-dropping (at most) to add an extra spooky layer to his story’s trappings. But, just as the strange positioning of the lock lends itself to allowing the reader to wander off in epic flights of fancy regarding just exactly why it appears that way, so too does the box with the name of Elias Varney. Why not imagine such a connection?

I, too, had set myself toward scouring the interwebs for some corroboration of the Varney theory, but found nothing beyond the forum source that you did. Since I am not prone to jumping on theories without multiple sourced facts to back it up, I discounted the notion. But I will agree that it is a most engaging idea, and it caused me to head further to King’s non-fictional foray into the history of horror fiction and film, Danse Macabre, itself first published a couple of years (1981, to be precise) after Night Shift. In Danse Macabre, King name-checks Varney while discussing Bram Stoker’s Dracula, but nothing beyond informing us that the novel “never degenerates to the level of Edgar Rice Burroughs and Varney the Vampyre.” So it is clear that King is well aware of Varney, but doesn’t hold it in high regard as literature. He also fails to include it in his list of important horror novels and stories in the appendix for Danse Macabre. Since there, by his own words, “roughly a hundred” such works included, it seems there would have been plenty of room if he wanted Varney there.

But it also doesn’t mean that he was beyond dropping a Varney reference into Graveyard Shift as a gag. And no matter how much certain writers might bemoan this fate, once the genie is out of the bottle, so to speak, it is not going to go back in easily. Once he published the story and the readers took in his words, the fate of Elias Varney became their concern, whether a lightly implied joke or the doorway to further horrors left undiscovered and untold.

Our discussion continues over on Rik's site as we delve into the film and its differences and similarities to the short story. To read that part visit Rik's Cinema 4 Pylon here.

Countdown Day 16: Literary Wrap-Up: 20th Century Ghosts

I haven't remarked on it here the last few days, but I did finish Joe Hill's 20th Century Ghosts a few nights ago. Like all anthologies, whatever the medium, the quality is variable, but I was overall pleased with the book. The high points were great, and the low points were few. Overall I think the title story, 20th Century Ghost, is the clear winner of the bunch. I may be biased, because I love melancholic ghost stories, but this one was creepy and sad and sweet in perfect measures. I don't think anything else in the book quite hits all those sweet spots for me, though each story has it's moments. I think the best way to describe the book as a whole is 'heartfelt.' I didn't like all of the stories, but they all at least contained a genuine thread of emotion in them. That's sometimes a problem with horror fiction, and short horror fiction in general, where the stories can often feel like guitar solos without a surrounding song; shock and awe with nothing to ground it or give it context. The stories here can be mysterious, and perhaps come across as incomplete, but I never doubted the emotion behind them.

I mentioned each of the first 8 stories previously over the course of this countdown, so I'll just mention the final 8(or 9, you'll see) here. In The Rundown is interesting, but is one of the possibly incomplete stories I mentioned. It feels like a short scene in the middle of a slasher movie as seen by one of those victims who stumbles into the movie just long enough to get killed. That's not strictly what happens here, but that's the feeling you get; that it's a small microscopic view of a larger story that the author isn't privy to. The Cape, about a man who discovers his baby blanket allows him to fly and uses this to petty, nefarious ends, is when I first started to notice a trick that Joe Hill uses often in his stories, and it started to bug me a bit. He frequently has narrators who are immensely unhinged, mentally and emotionally stunted, and yet can communicate eloquently and poetically about their plight. That's a forgivable sin, because it would be torture to read a 15 page stream of consciousness ramble full of typos, grammatical errors, and sentence fragments. And I can't say it hindered any of the stories, but it was something I noticed and it happened mainly in stories I didn't enjoy as much as the rest.

Last Breath feels very old fashioned, likened to Ray Bradbury in Christopher Golden's introduction, and I think that's apt. About a museum full of empty glass cases containing the last breaths of various people, some of them famous, some not. Dead-Wood is a simple idea, and told well. It's barely over a page long, just a handful of paragraphs, and it isn't even a story really. It's a concept, illustrated in a couple ways, and with a couple of lines at the end to provide the barest hint of a narrative. It's also pretty cool idea, although it's brevity was a wise choice. The Widow's Breakfast is a snapshot story without a real narrative arc, but it illustrates a very particular time and place. It doesn't have much to offer in terms of originality or depth, really, and it seems to be building to something that never happens, and ends rather abruptly. Bobby Conroy Comes Back From The Dead, despite it's title, is one of two stories that don't feature anything even vaguely supernatural(the other was Better Than Home). It's a sweet story, and an interesting setting, but like a lot of short fiction is more about the way it's written than what it's about.

My Father's Mask is a deeply upsetting story, and also completely inexplicable. Everything in it seems to almost make sense, but never does. It's dream logic, and each choice Mr. Hill makes in this story feels familiar and correct, but has no logical consistency. Recapping it would be useless, because I'm not even sure I can accurately tell you what happened in the story. Voluntary Committal closes out the book, and it's the longest story in here. It's also the one that feels the most familiar, if not derivative. It's supernatural elements have been used before in countless tales, and in fact the entire story feels like Joe Hill's take on one particular subplot in his father's book The Tommyknockers. It was, however, the creepiest part of Tommyknockers(and arguably the best thing about that book), and I found it's execution almost as effective here. I'm probably coming off as too harsh on this story, because it was good and took a completely different angle on the idea, so it's not really fair to compare them.

After that, I'll suggest you stick through the Acknowledgements section at the end, because there's another brief story hidden there. Scheherazade's Typewriter, like most of the best ones in this book, is short and a bit sad, and it features a nifty bit of retconning for the entire collection, casting each story in a new light. I remain impressed overall with this collection from Joe Hill, who I had actually avoided due to the Stephen King relation. That seems odd, since I buy every Stephen King book in hardback as they come out, but there's always a stigma that follows when a child enters the same career as their highly successful parent. After this, however, I've added Joe Hill's novel Heart Shaped Box to my bedside pile. That pile is actually pretty tall right now, so it may be awhile still.

Countdown Day 11: Second Diversion

Another day too filled to fit in a full movie. Actually, I could have fit a movie in, but not in one sitting. I had an hour lunch, an hour between jobs, and an hour or so after work before bed. I could have possibly fit in two movies in that time, but I hate watching in segments so I just went with a couple TV shows. Lunch was filled with Alphas, and the next two slots were filled by a couple other SyFy shows tangentially related to horror. It's a bit of a cheat, I know, but it fits the monthly theme.

Face/Off is a reality show about aspiring makeup effects artists, and is currently in its third season. It's the type of reality show I enjoy and don't feel bad about; it's about a group of talented people practicing their craft. Each week the contestants are given a theme, and three days(each day seems about 8-10 hours) to design, sculpt and apply a complete makeup. Sometimes the contestants work in teams, but mostly they work along. Sometimes there are shorter challenges in which they can win small prizes or immunity. The themes are along the lines of 'zombie Alice in Wonderland characters' or 'Superheroes' or, like last nights, Dr. Seuss inspired human makeups. This being a group of generally amateur effects artists with limited experience, the makeups tend towards the horrific or gory no matter what the topic is, though thankfully not in the Seuss episode. In general the show is fun, though it sometimes it falls victim to a tendency to kick off the wrong people, in order to keep more entertainingly obnoxious personalities around. But for the most part, the show is merit-based, and if someone does a good job it will be recognized, and the judges(all professionals still working steadily in the industry on pretty big films) seem to have a knack for intuiting who deserves to be given extra acclaim.

Hot Set is a newer show, and I've only caught a couple episodes, but it hasn't quite made an impact on me. Hosted by Ben Mankiewicz, who gives the show a slight bump in credibility, the show doesn't follow a team from episode to episode, but devotes each single episode to a contest between two production designers. Each production designer is allowed to work with two team-members of their choosing, and a small crew of carpenters. They're given only a handful of days and a $15,000 budget to design and build an entire camera-ready set and buy or rent the props to dress it with. So far the show hasn't featured many interesting personalities, and while it's still fun to see people working on a part of filmmaking we normally don't see, it isn't presented in a very gripping manner. The fact that the contestants don't stick around from episode to episode keeps things moving briskly, but the judges have yet to get comfortable with actually judging anyone. You'll see in their walkthroughs when they talk amongst themselves that they have pretty definite likes and dislikes, but they don't actually share their dislikes with the contestants, or at least they don't put that part on the air. It's nice, but it gives the show a distinct lack of bite.

The biggest problem with the show, though, is the limited time alloted to the contestants. It keeps things exciting, nominally, but it doesn't allow for many impressive sets. The idea is to keep things moving, and show the nail-biting pressure people really operate under in the movie business, but the results never really justify all the sweating. The sets end up looking like modest rooms with interesting decorations. I think giving the contestants a full week, instead of just 4 days(again, limited to 8-10 hours each day), would have improved the results.

Tomorrow; a return to actual, legitimate horror territory with a new vampire flick, and a couple more short stories.

Countdown Day 8: Better Late Than Never

This will be the first of at least two posts today, because I was too busy to put anything up yesterday. This Sunday I finished work on the project I keep mentioning(which I will get into later, I promise, but anything I say might be a bit premature at the moment), and crammed in one movie before I went to work.

The Four Skulls of Jonathan Drake was the movie of the day, and it's a bit of a disappointment. Not that the movie is the worst thing ever, but it had so much more potential than it actually achieved. Briefly, the film concerns a pair of brothers suffering under a family curse. One of their ancestors led the massacre of a small South American village in the 1700s, and now the brothers are being stalked by the two sole survivors(kept alive for 200 years by this same curse). The ideas in this film are pretty strong, and the internal logic of how the magic works is pretty cool; the last surviving brother at one point threatens suicide, because if he takes his own life the curse can never be completed and the two men trying to carry out the curse will never be able to rest in peace. But the execution was incredibly mediocre, from the fake, floppy knives to the stilted line readings to the listless direction. It easily could have been a pretty good movie, but it didn't quite seem like anyones heart was in it.

I also read two more stories from 20th Century Ghosts. Better Than Home was in no way supernatural, and was actually a pretty melancholic, sweet story about a boy remembering his father. The second, The Black Phone, was recognizably a horror story, and was pretty decently disturbing. Unfortunately, it ended abruptly on the kind of line you'd expect to hear Stallone or Schwarzeneggar saying after they killed someone in one of their movies. I can't decide if he was just blind to how it sounded at the end of a story that, up to that point, was pretty damn grim, or if he was just taking the long way to a stupid joke. Either way, it deflated the story pretty suddenly.

The Countdown Part 5

16 hour workday today, so not much time for posting. A busy weekend planned as well, but I should at least have a few minutes to post something a little bit more substantial. For now, here's the most compelling video proof I've ever seen for the existence of ghosts. The most convincing footage comes at about the :34 mark. Chilling.

My horror progress after the video.

Last night Amber and I finished out the first season of Tales From The Crypt with a three episode run. The first two episodes, Only Sin Deep and Lover Come Hack To Me are not my favorites. They both come across a bit dull, with a lot less of the campy visual flair that the series usually has. The edge goes to Only Sin Deep, though, while Lover Come Hack... never quite justifies it's existence. It's a great twist without a very good setup. The season ends strongly, though, with the taxidermy-themed Collection Completed, which is pretty much an example of the series firing on all cylinders. The visual style makes good use of it's limited budget, the writing is funny and disturbing in equal measures, delivered by a trio of top-notch character actors. Every line that M. Emmet Walsh delivers made me laugh, and I've seen this episode many times.

The story I read, still from 20th Century Ghosts, was Abraham's Boys. It had previously been published in a compilation of stories about Van Helsing, and concerned his children as they grew up in America of the early 20th century. It was good, I liked it, though I think it might be time I varied my routine. Possibly I'll pull out some of Clive Barker's Books of Blood for the next story or two.

The Countdown Continues... In Space! Day 4

There seemed to be an odd trend in the nineties, where horror franchises would inexplicably set their fourth entry in space. It at least made sense that the fourth Critters movie would be set in space; they were alien creatures and we'd already seen scenes at space prisons and in ships before the fourth film was spent entirely in space. And it at least fit the gimmicky, logic-free nature of the Leprechaun series to set an installment in space, though the idea was no less ridiculous for it. And then there's Hellraiser. A series known for it's grim, bloody aesthetic that grounds the fantastic in the grimy and mundane nature of our disgusting, blood-filled bodies suddenly sends it's main boogiemen to a futuristic space station to match wits with an ancestor of the toymaker that had designed the original gateway to hell.

It's that trend that had me rooting so badly for a fourth Scream film, if only so we could have had the tagline 'In space, no one can hear you... Scream 4!' Eventually we got a Scream 4 that was every bit as ludicrous as a spacebound slasher film would have been, but the moment had past. And all we had in consolation was the tenth Friday the 13th film, which broke the trend once and for all.

So, last night I tried to make up ground on my horror ingesting routine, but I was only able to squeeze in one Tales From The Crypt episode and one short story. Dig That Cat... He's Real Gone continues the strong run of episodes that make up the bulk of the short first season. Richard Donner's direction gets a bit hyperactive at times, but it's still a solidly written and acted piece, even on what must be the 6th or 7th time I've seen the episode.

The short story I read, once again from Joe Hill, was You Will Hear The Locust Sing, another riff on Kafka's Metamorphosis filtered through a slight atmosphere of 1950s atomic fear. It was well written, but the subject matter felt a little familiar and an atmosphere of unpleasantness hung over the entire story. It held none of the surprises that abounded in the previous stories, but I'm still excited to make it through the rest of the book.

The Countdown Continues... Day Three

I've got a bit of ground to make up tonight, since I pretty much struck out on my Halloween entertainment last night. The horror movie I watched turned out to not be a horror movie, and the short story I read turned out to be slightly supernatural, but not in any way meant to be creepy or spooky.

The director of The Tall Man, Pascal Laugier, had previously helmed the notorious Martyrs, one of the most well known of the recent wave of French Extreme Horror. Martyrs is a type of horror I'm not a big fan of, full of degradation and torture and sexual violence, but at least addressed those topics in a way that raised questions about why people are drawn to that style of entertainment. The audience was implicated in the violence as much as the perpetrators on screen. Likewise, the story of The Tall Man centered around a small, isolated community in the Pacific Northwest that is known primarily for the high poverty rate and large amount of child abductions, attributed to an urban legend known as The Tall Man. The film had all the hallmarks of a horror film, but really only classified as a thriller. The film concerns Jessica Biel as a woman whose child is abducted, and begins a frantic race through the woods and backroads to try and get him back. It's directed with a nice visual style, although the stylized lighting and camera movements can make it all look slightly fake at times(although there was only ever one moment where I was certain I was looking at CGI).

About halfway through the film Amber asked me a question and my only response was 'I have no idea what the fuck is going on in this film.' That's not a complaint. I actually enjoyed this film for the most part, though I'm still trying to decide how I feel about the last act of the film, and would have some reservations recommending it.

The story I read last night(still from 20th Century Ghosts) was entitled Pop Art. It's not a spooky tale at all. It's almost like a Roald Dahl book, or a story for more adventurous children. It hinges on one truly ridiculous conceit, and then just assumes the reader will accept this one change to the reality we all know. It was good, but not really keeping with the theme of the month. I'll have to make up for it tonight with some Tales From The Crypt and a true ghost story.

Day 2; the Countdown Continues...

Day Two, and the Halloween season is starting to get into swing around here. I'm still ramping up to some of my larger events of the month, but I've started fully immersing myself in Halloween appropriate forms of entertainment. Here's just a quick roundup of what I've been digging so far.

There was no time for a movie last night, so I watched the first two episodes of Tales From The Crypt. I've not seen a lot of the HBO series, but I've seen the first batch of episodes at least a half dozen times, so the surprises were no longer to be found, but it was still a comforting experience.

I'm currently reading 2oth Century Ghosts, a collection of short stories by Joe Hill. I've read one story before bed each of the last two nights, and it's been wonderful so far. The first night(actually just after midnight, so technically the 1st of October) I read Best New Horror, which was a fun, nasty little jolt of exhilarating creepiness. And last night I continued on with the title story, 20th Century Ghost, about the ghost of a young woman who haunts an old theater. Ghost stories are, by nature, melancholic, and I'm a sucker for stories that embrace that aspect. There's something innately heartbreaking and lonely about a spirit stuck reliving some momentous aspect of it's life. Like a 37 year old still wearing his high school letterman jacket. It may be the fact that I'm really excited for Halloween this year, or that I'm reading these short stories in bed past midnight, when all the lights are off, except the lamp by my bed, and everyone but me is asleep, but 20th Century Ghost really hit me pretty hard. Not scary, but a little bit wistful, and a little bit creepy. I read the final few paragraphs multiple times, and it literally gave me chills.

The Countdown Has Begun

October 1st. The official start of my favorite time of the year. The weather is crisp but not too cold, the leaves are changing color(well, to be honest they've mostly finished changing by now), winter is just on the horizon, and it's getting dark at night. That last one is helpful, as it aids in the massive onslaught of movie watching I engage in.

Yes, Halloween is coming, and I intend to revel in all things scary.

Throughout the month I'll be posting updates daily about all of the horror I'm ingesting, be it music, movies, books or... other. First up today, with a brief respite between my two jobs, is a quick glance at what I'll be going through this month. I present you with, my nightstand:

This is my reading list for the month. A nightly dose of short stories and horror history. Some old favorites(obviously well loved, by the condition of their spines), and some new acquisitions. First up is 20th Century Ghosts, a short story collection from Joe Hill, son of one Stephen King. I read the first story, Best New Horror, just after midnight last night. And it was a great way to start. I was thinking of alternating books, one story at a time, but this one grabbed me and I may have to just burn through this one in a few quick bursts.

Updates to come.

Tales From The Discount Bin: The Forever War

I'm cheating a bit with this entry, because Joe Haldeman is far from discount bin material(The Forever War is widely regarded as one of the 20 best sci-fi books of all time, which is an amorphous but still impressive honor), but considering how often sci-fi is marginalized in popular culture, I'm willing to allow it. Plus I made up the rules, and if you don't like it, tough.

I am not, typically, a sci-fi aficionado. I'm changing that, slowly, with this 'Discount Bin' feature, but it's still a genre that I'm largely ignorant of, and as such I have a fairly basic way of categorizing science fiction novels into two categories; soft sci-fi and hard sci-fi. Hard sci-fi is where the science is front and center, and dense, and often meticulously researched. Soft sci-fi is where the science exists merely as a kind of rack to hang the story on, and isn't explained more than is necessary to propel the story. Hard sci-fi is often full of big mind blowing ideas, but often, by design, is not very emotionally engaging. On the other hand, soft sci-fi, which I have to admit I usually enjoy more, is more geared towards exploring emotional and philosophical questions and uses the science as a starting point. The works of Samuel Delaney would edge towards hard sci-fi, while the works of Kurt Vonnegut would be clearly soft sci-fi.

I shared this viewpoint with my friend Eric, and it turns out he had a complimentary way of categorizing science fiction. He viewed sci-fi as either space opera or deconstructive. Space Opera was basically our myths transplanted to space, a way of reaffirming the truths we hold dear. Deconstructive sci-fi was the opposite, and used the medium to explore, subvert or argue against the ideals we as a society hold on to. Star Wars would be space opera, while Star Trek would be deconstructive(actually, it would bounce all over the place, since they tried to do so many different things with that show). If you were to take those and form a quadrant graph, with each corner of a square devoted to one category, The Forever War would form a pretty symmetrical shape smack dab in the middle.

The Forever War starts in the mid nineties where humans are much more technologically advanced, having discovered near-light speed travel(aided by wormholes which advanced the study of physics dramatically). When one of their research ships comes back horribly damaged, and all of it's crew dead, the military minds become suspicious. When first contact is made with an alien race(dubbed Tauran), humanity shoots first and asks questions later. So begins the Forever War, where the military drafts not dropouts, but the smartest and strongest college students(wanting physicists who would understand the technology needed), and then sends them out into deep space. If they survive, they will return to an Earth several generations on, where everyone they know is dead and everything has changed.

Given the option to resign after his first two year tour, William Mandella returns to an Earth several decades on. His father is dead, but his mother is alive, and Earth is suffering from the effects of a war that steals the strongest and brightest of it's children. He and Marygay, whom he developed a relationship while in space, find themselves unable to fit in to this violent, soul-deadening society, despite being immensely wealthy(military pay plus several decades of interest in their Earth bank accounts), and re-enlist as instructors. The army has other needs, and sends Mandella and Marygay back into battle. And so it goes. The two are sent back into the war, together for awhile until separate assignments make it impossible that they would ever see each other again(relativity being what it is, they will most likely die hundreds of years apart). Occasionally Mandella returns to Earth, or at least to humanity, to gear up with the latest technology and head back to the aptly named Forever War.

There are so many ideas in this book that I don't really know where to start. The science is at the forefront, and each idea is theoretically possible with what we know(or knew, in 1974) of physics. And yet, unlike some novels I've read, the technical details never go too far into mind-numbing statistics. Scratch that, it goes VERY far into the statistics, theories and practical uses of the technology, but it was like a really amazing PBS documentary that makes you want to go out and research the scientific theories at work. Much of this science is applied in weapons, of course, and there are some really fascinating things there, but a lot of it is also given over to relativity and the disorienting affects it has. It's one thing to leave for two years and come back to find Earth is 20+ years on, it's another to never know what type of enemy you're going to run into, whether they will be more or less technologically advanced than you. On first contacts, the Taurans prove to be horrible fighters, completely ignorant of warfare. They have some devastating weapons in space, but on ground they seem to have no concept of hand to hand combat. This changes as things go on, but it's never steady. They never know if, due to the physics of time travel, they will run into a group of Taurans that left port earlier, the same time as, or decades later than the humans did.

I think what makes The Forever War so distinguished among other Hard Sci-Fi books I've read is that he's applied the same conjecture to the social, emotional and philosophical ramifications of such an immense and expensive war. Each time Mandella returns to Earth, we are told of all of the changes on Earth, but also given explanations for how things got that way. For an arm-chair doomsayer like myself, all of it seemed completely plausible, and a bit more subtle than the average 'descent into savagery and fascism' than most sci-fi has. At several points Earth is even better off than when Mandella was drafted, since these things tend to go in cycles; things get better, things get worse.

By the end of the novel, Mandella has lived through over 1,000 years of human history, although of course it's been less than a decade for him. Towards the end he keeps getting sent out on missions because, as the oldest soldier, and one of only a handful to survive more than two encounters, he's become a folk hero, something for the propaganda machines on Earth to celebrate. The ending pulls out some sudden emotion, which seems slightly out of place against the fairly grim and emotionless events recounted prior, but it still gave me chills, and was immensely satisfying. I won't spoil it here, because it's a book that has surprises on almost every page, and really should be enjoyed blind(I've been careful to avoid some of the bigger shocks). I will, by necessity, be spoiling the ending when I review the sequel, but I'll give you all a few days head start.

I know I recommend stuff all the time, but right now I'm going to say that anyone reading this on a regular basis needs to go buy this book as soon as possible. I'm gushing, I know, but it really was a great book and surprised the hell out of me.

Tales From The Discount Bin: Wet Work

I've got mixed feeling about this book, which was expanded from a short story that appeared in the Night of the Living Dead inspired anthology Book of the Dead. In many ways Wet Work is spectacularly, awesomely bad, but in other ways it's just plain bad.

Phillip Nutman does deserve credit for creating a fairly unique vision of a zombie apocalypse, where Comet Saracen rains down radiation that revives the dead and weakens the immune systems of the living. The twist here is that not all zombies are brainless, although all of them are bloodthirsty. For reasons not explained in the book, some zombies retain all of their mental capacities, and actively choose people to recruit to their ranks, saving the rest to live as cattle. Sounds promising, right? Unfortunately the book takes until nearly the halfway point to actually bring the zombies into the heart of the action, leaving them mainly on the sidelines while the action is focused on two disparate storylines, neither of which is incredibly fast paced or interesting.

Story A follows Dominic Corvino, an Italian CIA assassin with a penchant for Billie Holliday and silk Karate Gis. Most of his story is devoted to a botched job in South America and his investigation into who betrayed his team. It's no real surprise to say his investigation doesn't stop when he's shot to death by a fellow assassin, although it should have. I mean, you'd figure a seasoned CIA assassin would know enough to shoot someone in the head. That's common knowledge even when there aren't zombies running around. Story B follows Nick Packard, a rookie cop teetering on the edge of alcoholism as he begins his career on the mean streets of Washington D.C. while his wife is away to be near her dying mother.

While I can't say Mr. Nutman is a horrible writer, he isn't an especially spectacular one either, particularly when it comes to pacing. The book lurches unsteadily along, seeming to build up speed repeatedly only to veer away from any buildup of action to focus on some fairly tedious domestic action, and then suddenly picks up steam and races to it's conclusion in the last 60 pages or so. Nutman is the type of author who explains characters rather than allow them to reveal themselves through their actions, so it's hard to get fully involved in the parts of this book where we're supposed to be worrying about their predicaments.

On a side note, this book was written in 1993, and takes place in 1995, and yet the president, although never named, is clearly George Bush, and Dan Quayle is the vice president. It's never explained, although I am curious as to how he could have made such a mistake, or why he would employ such an anachronism. That's the largest, although not the only, error in the book. It's clearly stated early on that the Zombies feel no pain, and yet when it suits the story they are shown and described as being in pain from certain wounds.

Still, the book passed a boring day answering phones at a temp job(no, I wasn't slacking, they told me to bring a book!), so it has that going for it. And really, what's not to love about a climax that features a full on kung-fu fight between two zombies in the lobby of the Pentagon(which had been converted into a farm where live humans are kept to be fed to the politically elite?

Tales From The Discount Bin: Richard Matheson Edition: I Am Legend & Various Short Stories

This past week I rectified a hideous error, and filled a gaping hole in my pop culture knowledge by reading Richard Matheson's famous I Am Legend, along with a handful of his short stories. Previously my only exposure to Matheson was through the numerous films made from his work(which include three versions of I Am Legend and some of the most famous Twilight Zone episodes), and quite recently I picked up a copy of The Shrinking Man, partly because the movie has long been a favorite, and partly because the cover showed a man fighting a giant spider. And that's always awesome.

Reading the book was interesting, because, as my friend Rik pointed out, none of the film versions thus far have come anywhere near the apocalyptic excellence of the originals ending. I looked forward to a completely shattering, shocking finale. But, despite the fact that three films have thus far changed the outcome, the novel was still not as surprising to me as I expected it to be. That's the problem with immersing yourself into so much pop culture; eventually this stuff just seeps in by osmosis. I think, however, that if I had read this story fresh, without having seen any of the films, I would have been flabbergasted at that finale. Don't get me wrong, it's a killer ending, but the shock of it was ruined for me some time ago.

Reading the short stories so quickly after I Am Legend was illuminating, and helped me put my finger on what it is about I Am Legend, and Richard Matheson in general, that just doesn't jibe with me. As an author he's very dry, and spends more time focusing on the day to day mundanity of his character's lives than he does on the horror aspects. There's a section in I Am Legend where Neville spots a wild dog who has somehow survived both the plague and the scavenging vampires. For 18 pages he woos and entices the dog into his home, desperate for companionship, and we're given long accounts of him watching patiently as the dog eats food he's left out for it. Then, after grabbing the dog, we're given this sudden sentence; 'a week later, the dog was dead.' This is something Matheson does a lot; he spends all his time on the buildup, and then gives us a premature and almost incomplete finish. For the most part, that alone doesn't bother me. I enjoy the sense of how even the most horrific circumstances can become not only bearable, but boring, only to be punctuated by sudden, often senseless tragedy. My real problem comes in how far he takes it.

I've come to the conclusion that Matheson is that rare horror author who really doesn't believe in any of that supernatural hogwash. He repeatedly takes great measures to explain in scientific terms the reason for the apparently supernatural events. In The Shrinking Man I wrote off his psuedo-scientific explanation as an unfortunate necessity, because in the end the science made no sense and was unsatisfying, but I imagine Matheson probably felt pressured to explain things at least a little bit. In I Am Legend it's a little harder to ignore. I really dig the idea that Neville, an intelligent but not highly educated man, has so much time on his hands that he decides to study infectious diseases and try and discover the cause, and maybe cure, of vampirism. For the most part these experiments make sense and serve the story. The germ causes a severe reaction to sunlight and garlic(although only when smelled, not when injected, for some reason I don't think holds water), increases skin resiliency, so bullets wont pierce the skin but a strong blow from a wooden stake will. Other parts of the Vampire myth don't hold up; running water won't stop a Vampire, and a cross will only cause a psychosomatic response in Vampires who were once Christian or Catholic. A lot of this was pretty interesting, but after awhile I got tired and hoped that Matheson would shift the focus, since the scientific exploration eventually became redundant.

Perhaps more extreme an example would be Mad House, my favorite of the short stories I've read so far. It's a pretty unique take on the whole haunted house idea, with a man caught in a sort of feedback loop where the house has gained enough sentience to enrage the main character(by giving him splinters whenever he touches wood, or having rugs slip out from under his foot), and that man's rage in turn feeding the power of the house. This is all pretty evident by the story itself, and yet Matheson includes a scene where a scientist friend of the main character explains his theory about the house, and that it may be some aspect of science that they don't yet fully understand. He goes on a bit about physics and atoms, and it doesn't really explain anything concretely, but it serves Matheson's habit of making the horror more scientific than supernatural.

Most of the short stories he's written don't really do much for me, or at least not as much as his novels have(so far). They seem more like writing exercises than actual works of art. That's not necessarily a bad thing, and a lot of the stories are entertaining precisely due to the way he chooses to write them. The story Dance of the Dead is written as a story from the future, with little dictionary excerpts to define some of the unfamiliar slang, Witch War has a shifting focus of narrator that's a bit more subtle than most, and Dress Of White Silk is written from the point of view of a little girl around 8 years old(I assume) who's done something horrid that isn't quite explained. And that in itself is another major problem I have with Matheson; despite his long passages of scientific explanation, he never really explains anything at all. In his novels I actually really enjoy that. He gives just enough information that you can start to piece things together on your own, but not enough that he spells it out for you. But in his short fiction you're more often than not left with the impression that SOMETHING has happened, but you really couldn't say what it was.

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Well, let's see, it's been almost two weeks since my last post, which was a tiny, mini-review of Let's Go To Prison. It's been over a month since my last 'Tales From The Discount Bin', several weeks since I did my last 'weekly' comic book spotlight, and I can't even remember how long it's been since I actually reviewed a movie(Let's Go To Prison was more or less just some random thoughts I jotted down to keep the writing muscles limber). I'm going to offer an excuse, because it plays into the general train of thought I'm on, but for future reference, when you see a lack of updates on this site, you can rest assured that I'm either too busy, or too apathetic, to write. As much as I love doing this blog, I find that it's best served by me only writing when I feel like it. If I try to force myself to write something when I'm not in the mood, it tends to prolong the feeling of writer's block. But, there comes a time when you have to get right back on that horse. I have a few movies stacking up that I need to review for Spout, and a couple of projects I do want to get into eventually, and this may help to prime the pump, as it were.

So, what have I been up to in the last few weeks? Working, of course. My job is winding down at KTUU, and the fact that I'm now in my last few weeks before the automation robs me of a job may be adding to my general lack of interest in writing. I've been planning a vacation for mid-summer to Tennessee so that Amber can visit her father, and, oh yeah, I gots me a tattoo! Pictures will be forthcoming as soon as I can upload them. Pandora broke my digital camera, and frankly I've entered that unattractive scabbing & peeling period, and I should probably wait until that clears up before I show the world. Amber and I decided that, instead of diamonds on our 6th anniversary, we should get tattoos! It's something I've been pondering since I was 18, but I just finally committed to it. I think it's pretty baddass, and am VERY happy with how it turned out. And for the record, don't listen to anyone who tells you getting a tattoo doesn't hurt, or that it feels good. Those people are masochists. Or sadists who only want to see the surprised look of pain on your face as the needle starts punching holes in your skin. Imagine a continuous bee sting that you can't flinch away from. Still, it was an experience, and after awhile you stop feeling the worst of it.





The other big event that's been eating my time like nobodies business is Stephen King's Dark Tower series. After three tries, and over 15 years, I'm finally finishing the journey. In fact, I'm so close to the end that I'm fighting the urge to turn off the computer and resume the story, but I need to write something today, so here I am. The reason I've tried to read the series three times is basically due to the large gaps between releases. By the time the new books came out, I had forgotten most of the particulars of the earlier entries. It really was a form of self-torture, because I have come to the conclusion that most of those first 4 books are really goddawful. So why read them 2(or 3) times? Well, for the same reason I made myself finish Gregory Maguire's Wicked, or the Da Vinci Code; because no matter how bad it is, I can't turn away from a book(or series) once I've started. I'm in it until the end.

Perhaps it's because I read it in Jr. High, and everything your exposed to at that age holds some charm later in life, but The Gunslinger is still an enjoyable read. It's the next three books that lose me.

The Drawing of the Three, especially by the time I tried reading it for the third time, nearly threw me off the path of the beam forever. I enjoyed the hell out of the first half, where Roland wakes up after the endless night seen at the climax of the previous book, and begins to find doorways into 'our' world, where he draws three people to join in his quest. The first person to be drawn, Eddie Dean, was sometimes an annoying character, but he seemed true. I think that's because Stephen King had enough experience to get inside the head of a 20-something junkie, and was perhaps trying to wrestle with his own addictions through this character. The second character, Odetta Walker, was simply ridiculous. I buy that King can get inside the head of a strung out junkie, but I don't really think he has the life experience or imagination to get inside the head of a young black woman in the mid-sixties. Let alone a double amputee with schizophrenia dealing with racism in the civil rights movement. It's a problem King faces time and again. I get the idea that he really likes black culture, and he really wants to be 'down', but at heart he's an uber-nerdy white guy, which makes his endless attempts to seem hip and with it just sad and mildly amusing at best, and outright racist at worst. His attempts at writing for Black characters always slip into slightly stereotypical jive talk, or he employs the oft-used 'magical black man(or woman)' approach, where the African American characters are there mainly so that the white characters learn important lessons and defeat the baddies. Think of the old lady in The Stand, or Michael Clarke Duncan in The Green Mile, or even Halloran in The Shining.


It took me over a year to finish The Drawing of the Three this last time(I put it down for several months, unable to bring myself to jump back in), and then suddenly I was interested again and forced my way to the ending. The next book went quicker, but it took more determination to keep reading, and that's because the entire novel The Waste Lands seems like Stephen King is spinning his wheels. I guess it gets the characters from point A to point B, but so much of the book just goes nowhere, while King is apparently selling by the pound(a point King himself makes in the seventh book). Wizard and Glass is the favorite of many people, and while I enjoy the overall story, and it has a couple satisfying gunfights, it feels a little hollow to me. Probably I'm not used to Stephen King trying to be romantic, and it didn't feel natural. But, again, while this fleshed out Roland's back story, it could have been edited by a couple hundred pages and been stronger for it. And in the end it didn't further the story at all.

So imagine my surprise when I not only liked book five, The Wolves of the Calla, but loved it. Sure, it's a direct homage to Seven Samurai(or Magnificent Seven, take your pick), but it was just an overall fun read, with a quick-paced, intriguing story. The difference here, I think, is that King knew the end was in sight, and so wrote accordingly. The first four books he didn't know where to go, and so cast about aimlessly for awhile, but with the end in sight everything matters, and the books become eminently more readable.

Part of this is personal preference, on top of the aforementioned purposefulness. I'm a big fan of breaking the fourth wall in fiction, and Stephen King not only breaks the fourth wall, he brings it down like the Berlin Wall, putting himself into the story in a move that could seem egotistical(and sometimes does), but really gives the story a sense of weight and urgency. A lot of people cried shenanigans, but I dug it all. There are a few things he did that annoyed me, like naming the robot servants 'Dobbie' models, or 'House Elves' in slang, or calling the mechanical explosive balls 'Sneetches' and 'Harry Potter Models'. We get it, you loved Harry Potter, but naming fictional elements of a fantasy world for characters in that series is just silly. Others are more forgiving of this, because Stephen King has had elements of our world show up in the Dark Tower series from the get-go(the bar in the first novel contained several drunken cowboys singing Hey Jude), but the Harry Potter references were really, really stupid.

But those pale in comparison to his references to 9/11, which crassly imply that the terrorist attacks were real-world manifestations of his novels, or the fact that he name checks the man who ran him over as a servant of evil. I guess I'd be pissed too, but come on, this is a real guy, who made a stupid fucking mistake and had the bad fortune of making it with a world famous author.

I'm still a hundred or so pages from the end of all of this, and King always has trouble keeping his endings on track(remember the Stand? 800 pages of buildup only to have the literal hand of god come down and stop things at the last minute), but I'm hopeful. And if he pulls this off I'll happily reread the series AGAIN when he republishes them in a planned revised format that will eliminate any continuity errors and tie the books together better.

Tales From The Discount Bin: The Kobayashi Maru

[For some reason Blogger won't allow me to add an image, so I'll try to remember and add one later. Also it won't let me spellcheck, so hopefully I don't make too many glaring mistakes.]

You know, I'm a geek. That's no secret. At best, I'm a dork. I don't think I quite make nerd because I'm not smart enough. Or at least not smart enough in any specialized area. In any field that I feel myself to be fairly well versed, I can think of several personal friends of mine who are more so. That suits me, actually. 'Jack of all trades, master of none' may unfortunately describe my life sometimes, but I've always preferred to be a bit eclectic in my interests. There are too many wonderful things in the world to limit yourself to just one field. And still, there are many more things out there that I have no real experience in. With this blog you've seen me attempting to stretch the boundaries of my cultural knowledge, and today I make another little nudge at that amorphous wall. Today I take another step into the depths of geekiness, boldly going, you might say, into a new, if not final, frontier. Yes, today I review a Star Trek novel.

Now, there are probably a few people who recognized todays subject from the title line alone, and to them I say 'Welcome! Greetings, member of my tribe!' The Kobayashi Maru, as any geek worth his salt knows, is the name of a Starfleet Training exercise first mentioned in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan. The test has since been mentioned in every subsequent Trek television series, as the Star Trek equivalent of 'damned if you do, damned if you don't.' Basically, the test involves the cadet acting as ship's captain, and receiving a distress call from a civilian ship inside the Klingon nuetral zone(a no-fly zone for both the Federation & the Klingon Empire, for those not in the know). If you ignore the distress call, the civilians will almost certainly die, but if you attempt a rescue, you will be risking intergalactic war. Indeed, immediately upon entering the Neutral Zone in the simulation, three Klingon Warbirds appear and open fire. The cadet can choose to fight back, but the computer has stacked the odds, and for every warbird you destroy, 3 more appear, until the ship is destroyed. Basically it's a no-win scenario, designed to test a command officer's ability to make tough situations that very realistically could kill his entire crew.

In The Kobayashi Maru, the first Trek novel by Julia Ecklar(she would go on to write 10 more), we get to read how most of Kirk's commanding officers handled the test. Returning from an away mission, Kirk, Sulu, Chekov, Scotty & McCoy are stranded when their shuttle hits a gravitic mine(it doesn't matter what it is) and their shuttle loses all power. With no way of contacting the Enterprise, and no way for the Enterprise to find them(too much debris and interference), the group passes the time by recounting how their Starfleet days, specifically in relation to the Kobayashi Maru simulation.

We all know how Kirk dealt with the test-it was revealed in The Wrath of Khan that he reprogrammed the simulation so that the Klingons feared him, and refused to attack. The book breezes by this, but spends even less time on how Chekov passed his test, putting considerably more focus on what came afterwards. It turns out Chekov was a bit of a career-minded dickhead in his academy years. After self-destructing his ship during the Kobayashi Maru simulation, Chekov and his class are sent off to an empty space station(closed for repairs, as it were) for a 24 hour test. The premise is simple; there is an assassin on the station, all you have to do is stay alive for one day. Immediately the cadets begin to form alliances and wage war on their fellow students. Imagine a futuristic version of the movie Battle Royale. Chekov, after betraying/killing his friends, then takes out the few remaining cadets by once again 'committing suicide', taking everyone else out when he sets off a bomb he'd been carrying. In the end it's revealed that there was no assassin, and they were being tested on their ability to find peaceful solutions to problems. The Kobayashi Maru, this test, and then that one episode of The Next Generation where Wesley was tested when Starfleet pretended a bunch of his classmates had died in an explosion. Starfleet are a bunch of douchebags.

Sulu is next, and his story begins slightly before he enters Command School, setting up his loving relationship with his great-grandfather, who is dying(slowly) from some unnamed illness. When Sulu finds out his great-grandfather has discontinued treatment, he stops talking to him. A few months later, after a training exercise, he is informed that his great-grandfather has died. The day after this is when he takes the Kobayashi Maru. Still reeling from the news, Sulu takes a completely non-violent approach to the test. When he receives the distress call from within the Nuetral Zone, he sends word back that he will contact Starfleet and they can contact a Klingon ambassador who will, hopefully, facilitate a rescue. This is, by far, the most logical response. After all, what was the freighter doing in the nuetral zone? Without being able to scan the area, how can he be sure it isn't a trap? Also, I found Sulu the most likable character in the book, and his relationship with his Great Grandfather felt authentic. Kirk was, even back in Starfleet, prone to an irritating sense of entitlement, Chekov was, simply, an anti-social jerk, and Scotty, as a character, was almost an afterthought.

Scotty's story walked that line between character drama and science jibber-jabber that has been the bane of the Star Trek universe almost from the get-go. The original series always had better ideas than execution, but as soon as the movies and Next Generation rolled around, the superior execution brought with it an increased focus on fake science. Really, when I watch Star Trek, I don't really care about dilithium crystals or warp cores or how the transporter works. All I need, when watching a science fiction show, is to know that the technology exists. After getting that out of the way, it's time to focus on some character development.


So yes, the big surprise here is that Scotty went to command school before changing his vocation to engineering. He never wanted to be there, though; his mind was always built more for schematics and tinkering than for command. His family, however, viewed engineering as a disappointing career choice, and pressured him into going for a command post. One of Scotty's teachers notices this, and gives him a way to study engineering without disappointing his family; The Kobayashi Maru. Scotty's solution to the test isn't so much a solution as it is a series of increasingly complex ways to destroy Klingon ships. And here's where the science jibber-jabber comes in, because many of the ways in which he destroys Klingon ships involve using the transporter to materialize things like dark matter into a Klingon ship, or causing some weird harmonic frequency between the Klingon's shields that causes them all to explode. I started to phase out a bit, but it also had that unorthodox problem solving aspect that I find oddly satisfying.

Scotty's instructor speaks up and has Scotty kicked out of command school for failing the Kobayashi Maru(apparently the only time this has ever happened). There's some made up reason involving Scotty using a technique that works in theory, but he knew to be impossible in reality, and thus he was cheating. But really, the bigger issue is that his instructor, well-meaning as he might be, thought that the best way to convince Scotty's family that he should be an engineer was to kick him out of command school. Surely that won't disappoint them, right?


In the end, of course, the tale-telling has not only kept everyone's spirits up, but given them an idea of how to signal a rescue. The Kobayashi Maru was a quick read, and all in all I really enjoyed it. I'm not sure if I'm ready to jump into the deep end and commit to any more Trek novels, but it was still a pretty good time.