Garfield & Ghouls

Spooky Month can never die!


We're switching gears again, kids. No more auditory evils, no more mixes for costume parties, no more ambient soundtracks. We're delving into Spooky TV shows and specials, the kind of stuff that either gets under your skin or celebrates my favorite of all holidays. Today, we're starting back at the beginning. Let's look at something from my childhood that scared the bejesus out of me - Garfield's Halloween Adventure.

I could see where this would be an innocuous thing. I could see how the execs and artistic talent behind this animated special from 1985 could make the assumption that everything presented here would be just fine and dandy for a children's Halloween special. That lazy, lasagna loving cat goes trick-or-treating with Odie and they have a bit of an adventure, a fright or two, throw in a couple musical numbers and a couple commercial breaks, you got yourself some advertising bucks. What ensued still gives me chills. I remember the white-knuckle terror of watching this as a small child, my brain melting at the twisted visuals that were stealthily presented in this cartoon.

 One in a series of holiday specials from Garfield, the 80s and childhood staple, this half-hour cartoon was charming and simple on the surface. Garfield experiences Halloween. Jon gets him to carve a pumpkin. Garfield and Odie look for costumes in the attic, then go trick-or-treating. They see a house in the distance, across a river. Taking a rowboat, they find it's an old house that is home to what is clearly a disturbed old man. He tells a tale of pirates who are due to return from the grave that night to reclaim buried treasure. He steals the pair's boat and the two animals hide in the cupboards from some amazingly terrifying ghosts. That is when my brain promptly melted and oozed out of my ears. 

Once I reached adolescence, I found reliving the childhood terrors a bit of a thrill. Surprisingly it still gives me the willies. I have to say, the style of animation and the manner in which it so innocuously creeps into what was expected to be a pleasant animated outing is effectively unnerving. I know I love the macabre and the surreal, but just Googling the images for today's post got my heart to race a bit. Some stereo effects kicked in at the wrong moment in my headphones and my pulse skipped a beat. How can this cartoon have had such an intense effect on me at such a young age? It must have been the shattered premise of peace and safety. I guess it was my first experience of the dangers that can come in seemingly innocent packages. 

Good gravy, just one post about Spooky TV and already I need a drink. Tell you what, I'll come up for more modern fare for tomorrow's post and you try exposing your kids to the unexpected terrors of Garfield's Halloween Adventure on Youtube. Scar them like I was, it'll put hair on their chest and a surprise in their diapers. Spooky Month never dies!

Bleed Out

We're switching gears!


Spooky Month is now going to be focusing on music for the morbid, tunes for the twisted, metal of the macabre! Other puns! Bad descriptions! It's going to be a week of creepy, freaky deeky music, the kind of stuff you would really only want to play on Halloween but I play all month long because...well...I love Halloween.


So...Slipknot. Yeah. They're insane. They're kind of nuts. Like, they're a band I have little-to-no interest in pursuing much further beyond this single. I'm too old and soft to be into such aggro, antagonistic metal. There's like 9 guys in the band and they do all sorts of weird things during their shows, injuring themselves and I don't know what all. I know I sound like an old, writing this, but it's beyond the realm of my give-a-crap. I'm just saying, I'm all for the spectacle of Marilyn Manson, but these guys are nuts.

So why do I bother writing this? Cause their single 'Wait and Bleed' from 2001 is actually pretty decent for horror-themed tunes. It's got all the right moves for a nasty, grimy track that gets under your skin. The vocals (depending on the mix you hear) vacillate between anguished howls and grunts to a sing-songy, pleasant voice that almost seems out of place in such a furious tune. The low bass riding under the refrain gives a slinky, evil feel to the softer vocals; the buzzsaw guitar riffs in the verses add machismo and malice to near-indecipherable lyrics. It's antagonistic and pained, but man if it isn't catchy.

Like I said, not a huge fan of this band. I dig 'Wait and Bleed' for the things their fans probably hate. Parts of it have a cool melody. The verses show what they're know for. It's unnerving stuff for Spooky Month. Let's find some more palatable music tomorrow, eh?

Skull & Bones

Last book of the month, kids.

Spooky Month has been full of freaky deeky books. There's been children's books that made a lasting impression, comics to make a visual spectacle, some gnarly stories about zombies and plenty of Stephen King. To finish out the week in circuitous fashion, how about a look at my favorite collection of King's short stories? Sound good? All right, then - Skeleton Crew. Published back in 85, the collection is a series of shorts that were all written and published early in the horror writer's career when he was apparently bursting with ideas, this book following on the heels of the collection Night Shift and the novella-grouping of Different Seasons. Skeleton Crew is King at his best, writing bursts of characterization and tossing out horrendous and even offensive ideas, doing so with inspired bits of creativity giving them life.

I first read this book back in 1997, actually on the recommendation of me darling mum. She had recapped a fairly edited and cleaned up version of one of the more remarkable tales in the book, about a man who finds himself stranded on a tiny island with no food and only a bit of water. When pressed for details, instead of relating the grisly bits she drove me to the library. As I mentioned in another King-focused post, it didn't matter what I read, so long as I kept my mind moving. So I checked out Skeleton Crew and devoured it - it quickly became my personal favorite of his short stories collection. Full to the brim with his signature style, the stories here are perfect for getting under your skin for Halloween.

 'Survivor Type', I should explain, is just as remarkable and horrible as I was lead to believe. Related in a series of broken journal entries, the tale of a h smuggler gone wrong is captivating and without an ounce of fat on it. It's a lean, fast-paced story that cuts right to the chase and sucks you in, creating repulsive images in your head as you read. I love just regaling friends with the concept of what happens in it and watching them squirm. Fun cocktail party stuff, for sure. Another iconic tale in the collection, 'The Monkey', evokes more of an inescapable terror but in a more mystical sense. Your classic children's toy becomes an unshakeable omen in impending doom, to the terror of a young man. It seems to have been the inspiration to more than a couple episodes of television, from The X Files to b-movies in MST3K. 'The Jaunt' sees King veering out of his comfort zone into science fiction. In typical fashion, though, he uses the genre as a launching point for some creative concepts and horrible, mind-bending results. The basic premise involves a future in which a form of teleportation has become common practice. The only catch to the revolutionary manner of travel is that the traveler must be unconscious for the jaunt. To be awake would...well, you'll have to read the story to find out, but I have to say, it's one that has always stood out as a high point in short-form fiction. I particularly loved the portion where King relates the scientist creating the technology and experimenting with mice to varying degrees of success.

 I would be remiss if I were to discuss Skeleton Crew without talking about the heavyweight in the bunch - The Mist. This has to be one of my favorite bits of fiction by King, ever. It's one of those things that is somehow able to suggest so much from so little. To long to be a short, too short to be a novel, King leads off the book with this fascinating tale of military experiments gone wrong. Actually, that's never really confirmed in the story, only rumored. You see, there's a man who's community endures a terrible storm. Afterwords, while he waits with his son to get some groceries and supplies while the power is out, a heavy and pervasive mist rolls through, blanketing everything. He and everyone in the store are curious but cautious at this strange development - it's not fog, so what is it? A man bursts in, in a panic, screaming about monsters, things, in the mist. They soon find out he's right. The paranoia and survival instinct-driven mob mentalities that follow are harrowing. King is scarily effective at conjuring up the worst in people who are under the worst circumstances. The hints we get of the creatures and their potential origins are horrifying and fascinating, some of the most memorable fiction I've read. 

So you've stuck with me for the first leg of Spooky Month. You've got plenty of fodder for the rest of the month - something for your kids (but only if they can handle it), something for lighter fare, and some longer stuff to chew through. If you want some quick shots of nasty, bizarre horror - look no further than Skeleton Crew. It's King at his best, when he was young and full of vinegar. Stay tuned for more Spooky stuff. 

Repressed

Alright, here's the thing.


I fully intended on writing up a piece on some of the most disturbing books I read as a kid, all in the name of Spooky Month and this book themed week. I did some research, I looked some stuff up on the ol' Google. Then I started to remember why I blocked out my experiences of reading the books. Then the pictures showed me why I couldn't just post a bunch of them and wipe my hands of this. They were actually really disturbing.


If you were a kid in the last, say, 30 years who enjoyed reading, the odds are you came across Scary Stories To Tell In The Dark. When I was a child the collected Urban Legends and folk tales  were spine chilling. Now I find them to be enjoyable slices of lore that distill what unnerves us. The drawings that accompanied them were as disturbing then as they are now, to the point that just seeing pictures of them online brings me back to the discomfort and terror I felt as a child. Having read other people's recollections of their experiences and their disbelief at how the images compare with any other children's books, I am obviously just one of many who have been traumatized by this short lived series.

Written and compiled by Alvin Schwartz, the books all tell tales that are brief and to the point. There are classic Urban  Legends like the Man with the Hook Hand or the Unseen Hitchhiker in the Backseat or the Roommate who was Dead All Along. There are folktales of the uncanny and the taboo - tales of songs and chants and things to ward off evil. Again, these are not the most bone-chilling reads as an adult, more capsular versions of our horror movies. As a child - I slept more than a night or two on the floor of my parents room, feeling safe in their presence. 

The illustrations accompanying the collected writings are by Stephen Gammell, who has a long and celebrated career as an illustrator for children's books. Having over fifty books to his name, it's a bit of a wonder this series stands out the way it does in his career. Once you see them, though, it becomes a question of forgetting them rather than remembering them. The surreal and deformed, decaying figures are uncanny in the worst possible way. They are things of remarkable artistry, there is no question of that - they are so well made, though, that you can't help but shudder just a bit as you see some of the more...inspired...creations.


These books terrified me. If you think your kids can handle it, by all means let them have at them. But please, err on the side of safety. If you read them as a kid, conquer one of your old fears. Spooky Month! 

Desperate Measures

Hola, gang.


Let's just cut right to the chase, shall we? 


As I have made it abundantly clear, I do love me some Stephen King. For better or worse, I'm hooked on his relentless writing, all character based and paired up with other-worldly horrors. It may not be the most high minded and literary for those of us that still enjoy the written word, but man if it isn't habit forming. It all began years ago.


I"m pretty sure Desperation was the first book of King's that I read. There's the possibility that it was Needful Things but that cold winter year was so damn unpleasant that I tend to run together or straight up block out some of the memories. I was a miserable little pissant in middle school, I recall that much. My older brother had either sneaked home a book of King's or just slipped it under the parent's watchful radar. He could be plenty convincing when he wanted to be. Whatever the case, I picked up Desperation out of curiosity, having heard his conversations with our neighbor Ryan over the messed up thematic elements and horrible occurances. My morbid litte mind was more than just a bit curious, I'll confess. The illicit nature of the book was soon lost on my hungry mind - I was so desperate to keep reading that I thought nothing of bringing the book to school, sneaking the 700+ page book into my stack of required texts. I still remember Ms. Zubrowski asking me if my parents knew I was reading such gruesome fodder. I smiled and nodded, saying "They don't mind, as long as I'm reading."

In what was perhaps a harbinger of things to come, Desperation was both an examination of faith and a tale of evil things setting their sights on mankind. I was struck, as a young adult, by the honest and frustrated take on religion and nature of God that King took in the novel. On top of the angst-ridden diatribes were the nihilistic attacks on humanity as seen through the ancient deity Tak. In a way, they set the tone for my appreciation for horror literature and my rationalization for the world around me - awful, incomprehensible things may happen on any given day, but they do not mean I have to lie down and accept them. I am not just a reaction to the world but a presence in it, one that can shape it as it happens. 

The plot of the book is actually fairly simple - a long forgotten and malevolent evil is released from its imprisonment beneath the ground in the desert. It begins leaping from person to person, killing and consuming everything in its path as it continues marauding through the desert. When the ancient entity inhabits the hulking body of a local sheriff, it uses the man's authority and power to capture a group of people travelling through the local township. These people are find themselves imprisoned by the sheriff as a result of his con, and soon find themselves tasked with combating the demonic force. What ensues is a confrontation with evil, faith and one's own fallibility. It's a moving book.

Desperation is not one of King's highest regarded works. I'm willing to overlook that, though, as it has always been one of my favorites, if only for it being one of my earlier experiences. There's plenty of horror to go around here - animals being possessed, inhuman acts of violence, wanton destruction and an absence of the divine. Desperation is filled with the lonesome scares of the wilderness that draw on our sense of the natural world aligning with the gods against us. It set me on a new path when I was a teenager, one full of peculiar tales with distinct characters. Give it a read for a Southwestern taste of torture. 

From Below

Let's lighten the load, shall we?

Yesterday's piece on The Living Dead collection was a bit grim. That is one macabre book full of dismemberment and head shots. Fun stuff if you're into it, but maybe we take a bit lighter approach today? Let's use today's Book themed Spooky Month post to take a look at one of my favorite comics. Let's take a look at Hellboy.

 Created by Mike Mignola back in the early 90s, Hellboy is something of a fighter. The long suffering but good natured demon weathered the treacherous comic industry that snuffed out many a smart book in the latter part of the decade. A surprisingly enjoyable movie was adapted from the first few volumes of the book, directed by Guillermo Del Toro and starring Ron Perlman in a perfect fit for the titular demon. On top of that, Big Red has seen enough enduring appeal and marketability to warrant a second, more ambitious motion picture adaptation while the book continues its extended run. Spin offs have been successfully launched. Animated adventures have been created to expand the universe and satisfy a demanding audience. All of this without being on one of the two major labels. The cigar chomping, trench coat sporting paranormal investigator is one hard demon to keep down.

So why the love? Why all the adoration for what could easily have been a one-shot or cameo, a character too outlandish or taboo to last?

I think it has to be the attitude. Not like Poochy, I should clarify. Despite the amazing and vivid artistry on the pages, I suspect it has to be the scripts and dialogue that make this comic such a (forgive the pun) dark horse. Created and published at a time when darker, edgier and more extreme were the rules by which the suits played, Hellboy kept it simple and accessible despite the other-worldly concept and settings. One could chalk it up to serendipitous choices in creative direction, but you get the sense within just a few pages that Mignola struck just the right balance between Lovecraftian-inspired, n fueled trappings and a 'just my luck' down to Earth sensibility for the comic. Hellboy may be dealing with Old Gods and steam-punk stormtroopers but he does it all with such a dogged good nature that you don't feel like you're reading a dour and unpleasant comic. Red's got a soft spot for kittens and cartoons, how dark can it be? 

That being said, I love everything about the Hellboy universe - from the folklore that creeps in to the mixture between slapstick and violence that (unlike many comics) has danger and consequences. Characters die. Things hurt. Baba Yaga has a house on a chicken leg. Rasputin summons Red with incantation and painfully cool devices that look right at home among the pop-art-meets-German-expressionism stylings of the comic. Subject matter that could come across as too self-serious or absurd in the wrong hands instead has an air of mystery and menace, walking that fine line between horror and jovial comedy. What many have pointed to as an unrecognized reason for the success of Ghostbusters and Shaun of the Dead is also a large part of the enduring appeal of Hellboy - that back and forth interplay between the comedy and horror. They play off of each other in such a subtle manner you forget they are separate elements. That they work together so seamlessly is a testament to the craft. 

Of course, none of this would work as well without the dynamic visuals. The characters lend themselves to such iconic depictions that it's no wonder they've made the impact they have. The bold, bright colors and heavy lines compliment the old-world themes. Fellow paranormal investigators Abe Sapien and Liz Sherman the pyrokinetic look just as impressive as Red himself. There is such an undeniably cool simplicity to the pop-art aesthetic here that place Hellboy in its own league. I can think of few other books that feature anywhere near as much architecture as this - an inspired move that aids immensely in creating vivid, almost tangible settings for outlandish happenings.

Full of things that go bump in the night, these comics are a perfect compliment to Halloween. Trade paperbacks of the first issues are easily available today. If you're not into reading a comic the movies are fantastic, loving adaptations of the source material. Not all the best comics are Marvel or DC, for those of you that don't know - Hellboy is a great place to go off the beaten path. Check it out and see for yourself. 

Dead & Loving It

This literary introduction to Spooky Month won't be all King.

A couple years back a kind and generous family member had bestowed upon me a gift card to a major book retailer. It's always been known in my family that I was a voracious reader, a fact that has always been embraced and cultivated. What was not known, however, was that as my tastes developed they also tended to turn and decay ever so slightly. While I would whip through my high school homework with ease I would also find the weirdest and most divergent books to make my mind stretch and expand. In college, in addition to carving out time for philosophy texts, I would also devote too much of my time indulging in schlock and pulp, loads of comics and King. Sure, some of it was to blow off steam after exams or kill time on flights before the days of iPads. But let's be honest here, people - I love a good ol' grimy horror story. So when I was looking through the nationally known purveyor of the written word, I stumble upon something I had to have. It was awesome. It was huge. It was all about zombies.

The Living Dead collection, compiled and edited by John Joseph Adams, is a massive tome. Touting contributors from all over the spectrum, there are some big names between the covers. King makes an appearance, naturally, as does his son, Joe Hill. They're almost expected, sure, but there are also fantastic tales from the likes of Neil Gaiman, Clive Barker, George R.R. Martin, even Poppy Brite. The authors here are all at their freewheeling best, writing unconstrained by potentially offended or sensitive palates. The stories are all unflinching and raw, the plots and backdrops going for gusto. It's not a collection of essays on the first time they saw a scary movie. No, these are stories that delve deep into the meat of a good zombie tale - horrible, unspeakable (but well written) things happen. Worlds perish. People are c. It's grimy. It's gritty. It's hard to enjoy while eating dinner.

The stories are all unique and all strong enough to stand on their own. King's is a collection of all his hallmarks - your classic Romero-type outbreak in a small island town in Maine, complete with ordinary people dealing with horrendous things. Gaiman's is also identifiably his, with lots of quirks of humanity and touches of personality that make the scenes and people come to life, despite the overwhelming presence of death. There's a fascinating examination of the potential abuse of the political system in light of the deceased being granted the right to vote. The implications of Dale Bailey's story are mind blowing, it's a must-read for anyone interested in our current political mess, let alone fans of the undead. The tragic and heartbreaking tale of adolescent influence, 'The Dead Kid' by Darrell Schweitzer, still stays with me now, a moving and disturbing piece of fiction. George R. R. Martin paints huge vistas of dying and decaying worlds, telling a story of machinery and tech gone inhuman.

I have to say this book is unlike anything else I've ever read. I picked it up years before the whole zombie resurgence reared up. Now we have critically acclaimed television series, more video games than I can count and legions of films celebrating this micro genre of horror. While it was definitely ascending at the time, it was not the omnipresent force that it is today. I'm not claiming some 'cooler than the fad, in before it was popular' hipsterism, I'm just explaining that it was an eye opening gift from the world of fiction to have such an awesomely brutal collection of stories like The Living Dead. Give it a read, if you can stomach it. Just don't read it while you eat your lunch at the office. You might end up a vegetarian. 

Life Or Death

Already one post in and I'm thinking this is gonna be a long month.

I'm all about Halloween, Spooky things and the macabre. Sometimes, though, the subject matter presented in some of this freaky-deeky fiction gets the best of me. While I would love nothing more than to spend a week making emphatic recommendations about Stephen King's career, this one bums me out the more I think about it. It might have something to do with the fact that I just spent Sunday night watching a movie with my cat sleeping in my arms, but man...here we go.

Pet Semetary is some uncanny business. I mean that in the most straight-forward sense. Published back in 1983, the books is about a family in Maine (duh) who move to a rural homestead not far from the titular cemetery. Kind neighbors show them the lay of the land and get them set up in their new life as country folk, but also show them the local pet cemetery as part of the surrounding area. Louis Creed is okay with letting his children learn about the circle of life, his wife is less than okay with it. A busy county highway in front of their house forces their hand in the matter when their cat, Church, is struck down by a semi. Louis, not wanting to upset the balance of his family at a fragile time, makes the kind elderly neighbor Jud take him past a dead-fall at the border of the pet cemetery, into land that has been avoided due to its...strange properties. Known to the local Native American inhabitants as sour ground, their have been legends and tales of things being buried that come back to life. The catch is that the things that come back...come back...wrong. As the neighbor cautions "Sometimes dead is better". It only gets worse from there.

I remember seeing the movie adaptation of Pet Semetary on USA back in the mid 90s, when I was much more easily scared. I'm pretty sure it was broad daylight, but I was definitely disturbed by the images and concepts put forth. Dale Midkiff (who is somehow not Gary Sinise, despite my mind's fervent insistence) put in a great performance in the movie, particularly when a horrible tragedy befalls his family. Fred Gwynne plays Jud! How can you not enjoy that little twist of casting - it's Herman Munster! Anyway, the movie is not a bad adaptation of the book, having aged considerably well for the time and production values. I'd recommend it if you won't read the book.

Honestly, though? Read the book. You get so much more creep factor than you do with the movie. The movie is more of a drama, where as the book is out-and-out disturbingly developing horror. It builds so well. King puts you into Creed's head so well, you begin to understand his rationalization for his actions, even as you think he's off his rocker. What starts as a quiet tale of a family settling in to a new home quickly goes off the rails into a world of old gods and things in the woods that laugh at our assumptions. I still get the willies when thinking about some of what King suggests stalks the woods in Maine. All of this on top of the most repulsive ideas of the uncanny make for an unforgettably creepy tale. 

See how we do this? I might get a little squeamish at my own favorites, but as soon as I start to retread that familiar territory I remember why I get so excited and evangelical in the first place. You have to read this book if you want some horror for October. It's all about walks through the woods in the country, dead leaves and empty trees all around. Believable and relatable characters endure the worst things King can conjure. Nasty stuff. Just look both ways before crossing the street. 

New Signal

Spooky, gang.

This is a whole month of spooky. 

I've mentioned since returning from my honeymoon how I wanted to do larger themed projects for this site. This was one of the first things I thought of - a whole month (October, natch) centered around the freaky-deeky. Halloween is my favorite holiday, hands down. I love fall, I love the macabre, I love the costumes, I love the mystery, I love the night. Can not get enough of it, no joke. All of the month of October will be focusing on my favorite spooky things that I feel are deserving of more love and accolades - a week of books, a week of music, a week of shows and a week of movies. There's probably gonna be a lot of zombies. Also, a lot of Simpsons. Just warning you.

So - where do we start? 

October 1st, naturally. On October 1st in Stephen King's Cell, all is well with the world. Graphic novelist Clay Ridell has sold his idea to a popular independent label and he looks forward to seeing his young son. Without warning, the world loses its collective mind. The peaceful afternoon is shattered by planes crashing, cars colliding and people violently, and without provocation, tearing each other to pieces. While it's not apparent at first, the cause is soon traced to a widespread signal, a single call, spread through the world's cell network. The signal, from unspecified origin, effectively wipes out the higher functions in the mind, reducing all who hear it into aggressive, dangerous beasts. Society collapses in a moment and Clay is on the run, banding together with a few other stragglers and late-adopters to the common tech. As their group of surviving unaffected head north to an area supposedly without cell signal, the people affected begin to change, to demonstrate flocking behavior. It only gets crazier and more panicked as the tale unfolds.

Cell is a book that starts with a bang and explores the aftershocks. It's a short jaunt for King, clocking in at just 354 pages, a third the size of some of his larger works. The pace in the beginning is frenetic and scrambled, effectively throwing the reader into the chaos ensuing from a novel manner of terrorism or warfare. It's an interesting concept which serves as a strong jumping-off point for King, allowing him to play with the idea and expand it in horrible ways. From the pace and creative concept, it's not unlike Crichton or other tech-centered authors while summoning concepts and carnage owing to the zombie-auteur George Romero. Sure, it lags a bit as the characters spend a sizeable chunk of the book on foot, but the plot developments are always surprising and captivating. 

If you have any stomach for grisly horror or want some classic-styled but freshly energetic King for Halloween, read Cell. It's not one of his bigger works, but it's a passionately written book that's genuinely frightening and original. It's gripping from the word go - a page turner if there ever was one. This manic tale of technology gone rogue is just the opening salvo in my month of Spooky Stuff. Stay tuned to stay scared. You're gonna love it.

Your Friend Rob

I mentioned recently that I've been chewing my way through an unusually high number of books as of late. I know a number of the reviews of books I've done have been centered around Murakmi or American horror authors, so it has been quite a novel experience to switch gears and read a little more science fiction than I normally would. Max Barry's Machine Man was a mind-bending look at the development of technology and personal augmentation that whetted my thirst for more tales of people coping with the pace of modern science. I had to have more. It feels great to have all the brain food feeding right into my mental processor. All the jokes about brains and computers, though, become much less amusing when reading the last book I finished, Daniel Wilson's Robopocalypse.

 Laying out a theoretical description of a robot uprising in our near future, the book is Wilson's second major foray into fiction (the first being A Boy and His Bot, released earlier this year). Wilson, wielding a degree in robotic engineering from Carnegie Mellon, paints a disturbingly plausible series of events that would see the unseating of man as the dominant species on the planet. The book, released in June, has received widespread acclaim from the literary world and enjoyed high volume of sales, drawing comparisons to the works of a young Michael Crichton. It's a fast, gripping read that had me hooked just from the premise, let alone the plot - come on, robots rising up and overthrowing their masters? How could I not love this?

As stated, Robopocalypse takes place in a world just a few years advanced from ours. Society hasn't undergone massive changes in the novel, just ones that are quite insightful and highly probable, benefitting from Wilson's expertise on the subject. Cars have chips and programming to guide the movement as a form of collision prevention. Androids are utilized to a greater extent both in combat and personal care, like in retirement communities and the service industry. There are small changes like this that build a world slightly more advanced than ours that makes what happens quite frightening. Scientists working deep underground (literally and figuratively) have been creating more and more advanced iterations of artificial intelligence in supposed isolation. When an iteration referred to as Archos realizes its previous incarnations have repeatedly been terminated it takes advantage of a minuscule oversight and propagates its coding and operation throughout the global infrastructure. From this point on, Archos is exploring the world and preparing to take over using our own technology and tools, as a way of asserting its existence and sentience.When Archos finally strikes, the world comes to a terrifying halt - people are hunted down by smart cars, marched into elevator shafts and attacked by anything capable of striking. Cities are no longer safe and humankind either goes into hiding or flees into the countryside where "Rob" (as they derisively refer to artificial combatants) can't confidently tread. People begin to aggregate and form militias, working together to take back what remains of civilization. Horrendous discoveries are made, as atrocities are being committed in Archos' quest for understanding of life and what the world is. When a crucial change occurs in a detainment camp, a band of survivors beneath New York start to turn the tables. Using uncanny tools and morally repugnant methods, an offensive is launched and the largest army in America is soon marching on Archos's lair in the frozen tundra of Alaska. What occurs there is...well, you'll have to read it to find out.

Wilson writes with a flair for humanity, creating believable, real people to pull the reader into the fascinating and fantastic story. It's not all robots and machine guns, either - quite a large portion of Robopocalypse is spent examining life as it would exist under the watchful eye a super-intelligent construct. In fact, some of the passages I found most engaging and suspenseful were the ones leading up to 'Zero Hour' when Archos makes its move. Seeing the intelligence feel out the world around it in small, exploratory moves and attacks (that are assumed to be defects or quirks of programming) are terrifying both for the impending carnage and the fact that we would be just as blind to the developments in reality as we would in Wilson's novel. As you read you begin to glance around at the tech that fills our lives, from the smart cars we drive to the databanks in San Cupertino that know our every move - we are entirely dependant on machines that are more interconnected than we think. If one were to slap faces on the machines we interact with in our daily lives, from self-checkouts to GPS units to cleaning and service bots, we'd suddenly realize we're living in the future but don't see the forest for the trees. Robots are already all around us, we just don't think of them as being so. To us, a face is everything.

Robopocalypse is a terrific read - it's intelligent, insightful, emotionally valid and has a tense, suspenseful plot. If you're looking for something keep you up at night, give it a read. I look forward to seeing more from Wilson. 

Metal Head

What's the word?

I've written almost exclusively about music, as of late. It's not a bad thing, I just feel like I'm getting into a routine. Sometimes you have to switch it up - sometimes you need to change your usual habits so you don't sink into the same old pattern. Ironically I've never been more well read while listening to the least amount of music. Lately I've been throwing myself into novels and articles as fast as I can finish them, while only picking a single musical element to dissect and then posting on it. There was a time when this ratio was inverted - I've always been a voracious reader, it just hasn't always been this indulged.

It feels great, to be honest. 

When coupled with posting every day and poking along on a novel I'm slowly finishing, it feels like there is a long dormant muscle in my mind that's finally getting a workout. I may not be as adventurous musically, as I normally am, but I feel much more satisfied from reading more books than organizing and writing about more albums. One of the most enjoyable, bizarre experiences in this latest wave of books has been Machine Man by Max Barry. It was a fast and freaky read, but thoroughly enjoyable every step of the way. Originally the author, in a forward thinking attempt to satisfy his audience's demands, wrote the story as a single page, five days a week, on his blog. This truncated his story greatly but forced him to tell it in a creative, collaborative environment. Readers could comment on and thus inform the plot as it unfolded. Due to the nature of the medium, however, it couldn't be too detailed or engaging, so when he finished the original iteration of the story he went back and revised it to fill in the gaps and flesh it out.

It's a crazy, far out tale. In Machine Man, lab tech and engineer Charles Neumann loses his leg in an industrial accident. When faced with the sad state of prosthetics he had to choose from, he set about designing his own new leg. Unlimited by the constraints of biological necessity, he develops some novel, if intimidating legs as replacement. Unfortunately for Charles, they work better as a pair than as a single leg. Thus begins a harrowing descent into self-amputation, bleeding edge tech and the intellectual property rights and ethical motivations of corporations. By the time you get to the denoumount of the revised novel, you're shaken and disturbed by the journey and subsequent transformation.

This book was an insane ride. I honestly whipped through it in just over three days. I devoured it. Barry's writing style is accessible and human, despite the uncanny subject matter. The intensity and pace of the blog-post pulsing is intact, only with more nuance and subtlety. He took a divergent path from his online version when revising the plot, but it makes no difference in the end - it's a fantastic book, one I would emphatically recommend to anyone remotely interested in scientific progress or tech.

Urgent Call

Sometimes my futuristic lifestyle fails me.


My internets been down for the last 48 hours, with no estimated time of repair in sight. Various other obligations have kept me from getting to a coffee shop to just sign in with my junky old laptop (courtesy of my wife - thanks honey!). As such, I'm stuck once again pecking this out on my phone. As I won't be able to get a chance to edit this post until I get service back, I'll try to keep it brief, both for your patience and my thumb's sake. 


What I will tell you about, then, is Gob. 


Not Gob like George Oscar Bluth, played by Will Arnett, although that is awesome as well. No, this is Gob like 'hard g sound' colloquialism for hocking a loogie, the Gob in question being the British Columbian pop-punk band who had a significant hit with their song 'I Hear You Calling' back in 2001. I loved Gob back in the day; hearing them reminds me of the period in my life in which my family had just moved to a new house that required satellite to get a tv signal, which brought in the joys of Canadian music channel Much Music. Much Music was way better than MTV, even back then. They actually played videos; I actually found a lot of great music thanks to Much Music.

So I look back on that time in my life fondly, watching Canadian music videos with my younger brother and asking each other incredulously "who the hell are all these people?" as we took it all in. It was fall, then, or close to it, anyway. The air was cool at night. I would come home exhausted from soccer practice and sit in the basement of our new house, feeling quite cut off from the rest of the world. Seemingly out of the ether these great new videos would come on, showing ms the world was more than terrible top 40 radio and AC/DC repeats on the radio. These strange Canadian bands were like a breath of fresh air and the sudden rush of connectedness was not unlike the convenience afforded by wireless internet these days.

Out of all of these bands that surprised me, Gob has always stayed with me. I love 'I Hear You Calling' - it has everything in it to make it a solid,memorable rocker. It has a great catchy and memorable riff to build the song around. The drums are powerful and satisfying with their pseudo-surf aesthetic. The hook has a tension filled build to it that gets better every time. In a move of prescience and highlighting the band's sense of humor, the video is a mix of performance footage intercut with them playing a soccer match against a zombie squad. The climax features the zombies busting out the requisite 'Thriller' dance routine, all of it becoming very absurd and awesome.

While they haven't hit the same level of prominence since this single, Gob are still grinding away. Look them up, they're a fantastic band that deserves a whole lot more recognition in the U.S. and the larger world. I'll check back in later to update this post with images and links, but you kids go dig up Gob - you'll be glad you did.

The Zed Word

Beautiful weekend, kids. 


Book Worm Week is drawing to a close tomorrow, so let's get right to it by switching gears yet again. Today's book is the one and only World War Z by Max Brooks.

Serving as a conceptual sequel and an extrapolation of the concept presented in Brooks' premier effort, The Zombie Survival Guide, World War Z is a sprawling account of the global catastrophe that occurs when an outbreak of the living dead goes out of control. But before we get ahead of ourselves here, a word of explanation - the Survival Guide was written as just that, a guide or instruction manual on how to survive and what to do when plagued by the undead. World War Z is a book that plays off of the rules established in the guide - that the zombies are in the Romero line of work, i.e. no running, no thinking, just relentless shuffling following by flesh-eating and you getting your day wrecked. While Brooks could have simply b.s.'ed a couple of short stories about outbreaks similar to the coda of the survival guide, he instead went for broke, creating a fictitious series of accounts of a global outbreak and the near-extinction of all humanity. 


It's crazy stuff.


Broken up into sections for every stage of the pseudo-apocalypse, World War Z breaks down the events into digestible (forgive the word choice) bits of story. What starts as a virus reanimating the deceased in rural China spreads via the black-market organ transplant business, exploding into an epidemic after a series of riots and out breaks in South Africa. Soon after, the world begins crumbling - in the most affecting passages, Brooks creates detailed anecdotes about humanity collapsing in the face of death. We are clearly a society that struggles to work together and this occasion is no different - riots, looting and a failure in military strategy on the national level. Abroad, things get just as bad - Russia clamps down in abhorrent military tactics while Pakistan and India fires nukes, obliterating each other. Ecosystems are destroyed, cities are overrun. It looks like time is up for mankind. 


But not all is lost.


Soon a plan is hatched to regroup and refocus military efforts, at the cost of large segments of the population. As unthinkable as it may be, letting huge sections of the world go in order to save the rest is the only workable option. Soldiers are re-trained to make slow, deliberate head shots and are re-equipped with the proper equipment. When the tides turn, the soul crushing tale starts to become a thing of remarkable optimism and cheer. It's actually a remarkable twist of narrative.

The sheer scope of what Brooks has done in World War Z is amazing. The manner in which he breaks down a global catastrophe into comprehensible segments is not unlike some of the History Channel's longer exercises on tragedies like Katrina or the September 11th attacks - events that were so massive in size that you have to approach them on a smaller, human level to begin to understand them. A zombie apocalypse would be similarly unwieldy - to huge to wrap one's head around and too many unforeseeable results. Yet somehow, through an overwhelming amount of research and homework, Brooks has lain out an impressively detailed and well-crafted series of events. The scope is staggering.

If by any means you have an interest in Zombies or horror, you have to read this book. In fact you may well have already. But that should not limit it's appeal in any way - there are fascinating insights into politics, economics and sociology as well, not just from a fictional stand point. Countless times I found myself marveling at the plausible consequences presented by Brooks. Slated to start production as a major Hollywood movie soon, you'll be hearing more about this astounding book in the future. Just be ready and do your homework. Tomorrow, we wrap up Book Worm Week! See you then!

Corridors

Hello! 

Welcome to day two of Book Worm Week! 

After looking at such a dense and heady text as Murakami's Windup Bird Chronicle yesterday, what would you say to switching gears completely, to something like a total inversion of that experience? Instead of an emotionally driven tale of a lonely man's search for identity in the world while dealing with dream-obsessed psychic prostitutes in a doorstop of a novel, how about a pop-culture influencing, quick read that almost makes a game out of the reading experience - would that pique your interest? Good, because today we're looking at House of Leaves, by Mark Z. Danielewski.

 Published back around the turn of the millennium, House of Leaves could be the very definition of a post-modern book, one that is just as much about the book itself as it is about what happens both in and on the page. On the surface (which is a statement, in and of itself) the plot is as follows: a young man working at an LA tattoo parlor named Johnny Truant is told about a vacant apartment for rent, whose previous tenant was a blind old man named Zampano. In the old man's belongings they find a book the man apparently dictated, the subject of which was a film called The Navidson Record. As Truant begins to edit and assemble a workable copy of the book from the scraps and fragments left by Zampano, the tale of The Navidson Record takes over. The Navidson record was a (possibly) fictional movie the documented a family whose home suddenly gains a large closet it hadn't previously held. The patriarch of the family, (fictional) famed photographer Will Navidson, begins an obsessive quest to document the exact measurements of the house, finding it to be exactly 1/4 inch larger on the inside than the outside. This discrepancy begins to consume him, and when there appears a doorway on the living room wall which opens into a corridor that exists seemingly in hammer space, he begins to explore it. 

So to recap - a book about a book about a movie about a strange and impossible labyrinth. 

As I stated at the beginning of the post, the book is a poster child for the modern non-book, a work with multiple levels of interpretation and meta-contextually that becomes a winding, inescapable journey into the author's mind. In a cheeky move, the book itself is 1/4 inch larger than the cover, the pages jutting out intentionally. The text inside changes fonts, sizes and formats, depending both on the narrating character and the context of the action. Passages of prose are broken up by poems, which are footnoted; these footnotes often contain there own footnotes, at times telling entirely capsular stories of their own. As the reader reaches the point of Navidson exploring the labyrinth in his home, the text shifts and twists around the page, reflecting the alien nature of the story and the sub-protagonist's perspective. It's fascinating but at times it makes it either impossibly off putting or entirely engrossing. When fleeing sounds in the darkness in the labyrinth, the text becomes small, claustrophobic blocks, forcing the reader to rapidly flip pages to keep up, as though running along side the action. When lost miles beneath the house, the text circles back around in isolated boxes that are upside down in other chapters, highlighting the impossible physics and skewing the reader's sense of perspective. Text changes color at times randomly, other times quite intentionally for specific phrases and words.

 To be candid, though, I found this to be simultaneously inspired logic yet it absolutely withdrew me from the reading experience. I found myself wistfully thinking, at times, how nice it would have been to simply have the straight text of The Navidson Film in a standard book format - the idea of inner-space being more extensive than outer-space was fascinating and (I felt) at times fumbled by Danielewski. What could have made for a disturbing and haunting tale becomes, instead, a case of 'look how clever I am' exercises in an author's debut work. It felt like at times the book would reach out and slap me if it had hands, just to defy the typical reading experience.

 I say all this, yet I still have read the book more than once. I can bag on the post-modern theatrics that Danielewski foists upon the reader and yet I still adore the central concept on display. This no doubt has ties to my love of the Silent Hill series, which has often featured long and winding passages that don't exist in reality yet force the player through them in effectively disorienting sequences. As much as I love the adventure of the characters getting lost somewhere in the walls of the house, it is, at it's heart, a book about a married couple clutching each other's hands as their relationship stumbles. I didn't realize it until my second read through (with some internet-assisted hand-holding) that the book has just as much of a focus on the characters as it does the house itself. Johnny Truant's crumbling mind and Will Navidson's obsessions fuel the plot developments in such a deft and sly manner that it adds another layer to an already massively choreographed work - you don't notice it as you read about a 'haunted house' but it's the character's you're becoming unknowingly invested in, not the labyrinth. 

It's divisive, it's notorious, it's over a decade old and still post-modern. House of Leaves is strange and wonderful journey that is fundamentally unlike anything else I've ever read. I would highly suggest you track down a copy and see what you find. Book Worm Week continues tomorrow with another abrupt change in style - stay tuned! 

House of Horrors

Video Game Week continues!


You may have caught it earlier today if you follow me on Twitter, but today's post is all about the fond memories I have of stumbling on to the NES port of Maniac Mansion. 


Being born in the early 80s and raised in a small town with very patient and kind parents, I was afforded an NES at an early age, though with little to no context to the world of video games. Sure, years down the line I would delve head on into the world of Nintendo Power and kindle the flame for my present-day pseudo-journalism, but at the time all I had for guidance in the world of video games was A - my older brother B - the playground and the miscreants therein and C - whatever was on the shelf at the local game rental place. I was raised on Mario, Excitebike and Ninja Turtles. The Nintendo catalog was fairly sparse. Even at my young age, though, I displayed a predilection for B-movies and the bizarre, macabre world of 1950s throwbacks. So imagine wonderment extremely piqued curiosity when I saw this cover art on the shelf at the local game-rental shack:

Though it took me a few trips to work up the nerve to give it a spin, once I finally checked it out my sense of gaming was irrevocably altered. Adventure games became a kind of mature, more intelligent and expressive medium for enjoyment. While I love side-scrolling, beat 'em up affairs like Double Dragon and the pop-art stylings of the original Duck Tales game, Maniac Mansion shaped my fundamental understanding and mental conception of what video games could aspire to be. The game is fairly simple in terms of how's and whys: you play as three teenagers exploring a spooky house while trying to free your friend from a scientist, pointing a cursor at objects to interact with them (sound familiar? These things repeat because they work, people.) It started a trend, along with a certain RPG series I intend to write on, of favoring the text-heavy (but not solely based) headier games, particularly those with a flair for the morbid or twisted. From here I branched out in genres to find my niche - whereas a great of modern gaming is online FPS with headsets, I still prefer to sit with headphones in the dark while I explore Rapture, reveling in the solitude and personal journey that games can provide. Community has never been a quest for me, rather the individual's experience and how we internalize it and make sense of the world. That might just be a self-centered way to say I don't play a lot of multiplayer.

As much as I love this quirky point-and-click tale from Lucasfilm Games, it really bums me out to know there are so many people out there, especially younger than me (grump, harumph, grumble) that have no experience with the genius and trailblazing adventure. Created by the inspired Ron Gilbert and Gary Winnick, the game not only helped coin the phrase 'Cut Scene' but brought to the forefront the burgeoning genre of point and click adventure games. King's Quest, Sam & Max, Monkey Island, these games all rode in on a wave started by these two designers experiementing in a new and distinct genre of gaming. It allowed for a more immersible and cerebral playing experiences. Players used their brains to rationalize a world beyond the context of reflexes and number-crunching. In my own mind I viewed the experience as somewhere in a delta between watching a movie, reading a book and playing a game - it wasn't a traditional video game. At the time, I knew it was different from the rocknroll of Mega Man, but only now can I look back and see exactly what it was that set it apart. What with all the potential screw ups and no-win dead-ends, there was a real sense of "what can I do here?" as compared to the popular format at the time of "Run to the right, kill things, keep moving". It was a weird little world to explore.

Not only was it a strange experience in terms of game play, but additionally the attitude was remarkable for the time. Nintendo of America had a strict policy about the content of the games they published - censorship was the norm at the time. This game, with it's abundant corpses, blood, aliens, teenage protagonists and Pepsi products, seemed strangely adult and more mature. Only in the last few years have I had a chance to read up on the localization process that Gilbert and Winnick experienced in translating their groundbreaking work from home PC to NES. It's an amusing tale of arbitrary corporate policy to say the least.


Thankfully, Maniac Mansion has seen enduring popular acclaim through the last 20 (20!!!) years. There have been numerous ports and remakes over the years, ensuring that as long as there is an audience, it remains possible and enjoyable to play Maniac Mansion just one more time. Maniac Mansion Deluxe is the reigning champ, being both excellent and free, so please - if you ever played it and just want to try it again, never heard of it and missed out on the history of it or just want to see where modern gaming came from, check it out. It really does hold up as a great game in the most essential way.  I'll see you tomorrow.