Happy Spooky Book Season, Hungry Readers!
Instead of just filling you up with the details of what I've devoured this delicious month, I've decided to give you a menu from which you can make your own selections.
I can't tell you what foods you will encounter in each title, but rest assured that in every one of these works of horror, someone is eating...or being eaten. ;)
Feel free to add any tasting notes below! Shelley W.
TOP 10 HORROR BOOKS OF 2016* 1.
Children of the Dark,
Jonathan Janz 2.
The Consultant,
Bentley Little 3.
The Doll-Master,
Joyce Carol Oates 4.
The Fireman,
Joe Hill 5.
The Gods of H.P. Lovecraft,
Aaron J. French
6.
Mr. Splitfoot,
Samantha Hunt 7.
My Best Friend's Exorcism,
Grady Hendrix 8.
Pressure,
Brian Keene 9.
Security,
Gina Wolsdorf10.
We Eat Our Own,
Kea WilsonTOP 10 HORROR CLASSICS** 1.
Haunting of Hill House,
Shirley Jackson 2.
Rosemary's Baby,
Ira Levin 3.
The Call of Cthulhu,
H.P. Lovecraft 4.
It,
Stephen King 5.
Horns,
Joe Hill
6.
Hell House,
Richard Matheson 7.
Ghost Story,
Peter Straub 8.
Frankenstein,
Mary Shelley 9.
Don't Look Now,
Daphne Du Maurier10.
The Hellbound Heart,
Clive Barker *Compiled by
Booklist**Complied by
The Lineup
The British Library is hosting a display focused on gothic storytelling called “Terror and Wonder: The Gothic Imagination.” It will run until January 20, 2015.
The United Kingdom’s “biggest ever Gothic exhibition” features 200 rare objects; some of these pieces shine the spotlight on works by writers Mary Shelley, Bram Stoker, and Clive Barker. Visitors will see ”posters, books, film and even a vampire-slaying kit.”
We’ve embedded a video about this exhibit—what do you think? Click here to learn more about it. Follow this link to read an essay by Neil Gaiman entitled “My hero: Mary Shelley.”
New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.
posted by Neil Gaiman
I was asked recently,
on a stage in Sydney, what the best advice I'd ever received from another author was, and I told
the Harlan Ellison shaving story I've told here. It is invaluable knowledge.
This morning I thought,
I wonder what the best non-shaving advice I've actually got from another author was...? And then I knew.
It was in 1988, at the World Fantasy Convention in London, in the bar. I was a bunch of people around a table, and had been interviewing Clive Barker about comics for a book on Clive that would be coming out. After the interview, a conversational free-for-all developed -- I remember getting frustrated with Clive's view that comics were lacking something that prose had, because a novel could make him cry while a comic never had. (This was 26 years ago. I have no idea at all if Clive still thinks that way, or if a comic has made him cry.)
And after the conversation was over, Clive took me aside. He said, "When we were talking, you were getting louder and louder."
I had been. It was a noisy bar. And I'd had important things to say and huge opinions and dammit, I was determined to be heard.
He said, "Neil, don't do that. If you get loud, everyone gets louder to top you. And then everyone's shouting and nobody's listening. If you want everyone to listen to you, get quieter. People will listen."
It seemed like the strangest advice I'd ever received. But I loved and respected Clive, so the next time I was in a bar argument/conversation, I lowered my voice. And the more I wanted to be heard the quieter I forced myself to get. I lowered my voice...
And people lowered theirs. They leaned in. They listened. I didn't have to raise my voice.
I felt like I'd been given one of the keys to the universe.
And so I pass it on to you.
Clive's been having some health issues recently, and I hope they are soon over and he's back to full strength. He was an inspiration in every way when I was in my early twenties, and I've learned so much from him over the years. Here's a photo from 1989 stolen from
his Facebook page.
...
Monday at midday Eastern Time, the first part of the mad make good art project I'm doing with the assistance of Blackberry will begin. It'll be happening (to begin with) on Twitter. I'm @Neilhimself there (some people might not know this). I'll keep you updated with links and such on here, too.
...
Right. I'm at home. The home in the midwest. Lots of cool things waiting for me here, including a bunch of books, one of which is the new edition of American Gods -- for the first time, the US edition of the Author's Preferred Text is out in paperback. (It's also the first of the New Uniform US Paperback covers to come out
and will be released in a few days.) It's in the bottom second from the right...
(Also shown, two foreign editions of Sandman, three books that include short stories by me, a book I love with an afterword by me, and my copy of
a great guide to where you start reading an author -- I got it because I backed the Kickstarter, not because there is a chapter on where to start reading me written by the outrageously talented Erin Morgenstern.)
It's cold here. But I'm wearing long underwear and will dress warmly and am about to take Lola for a walk down to the lamppost in the woods. Will post a photo if I get a good one.
Yes, the house feels empty and strange. But Lola is a sweet and loving dog. And I am writing things.
(The little flashlight around her neck is not really so that she can see better in the dark. It's so I can see her in the night.)
Horror novelist and screenwriter Clive Barker has been hired to rewrite the Zombies vs. Gladiators for Amazon Studios.
Although the press release doesn’t mention their names, the original script was written by Michael Weiss and Gregg Ostrin for Amazon’s annual slate of film-writing contests. At Amazon Studios, you can watch an animated test movie version of Zombies vs. Gladiators or download a copy of the original script.
Barker had this statement: “I’m excited by the opportunity to interweave two very rich narrative threads. One of them concerns itself with the reality of the decadence of Rome and its rise and fall. The other is a fantastical narrative element – the living dead. My brief to myself on this project is to give the audience not only zombies they have never seen before but also a Rome they have never seen before … In twenty-five years of working in this town, I’ve rarely had people listen to what I had to say as closely and as carefully as they did and then simply give me the freedom to go do it.”
New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.
After earning the support of horror novelist Clive Barker, filmmaker Mark Miller hopes to raise $7,500 to shoot a trailer for The Sickness–his film script about a zombie road trip.
Follow this link to watch his pitch (features a few shots of gory zombie makeup).
Here’s more about the project: “I showed my script for The Sickness to Clive and his resident make up effects team, Stephen Imhoff and Cris Alex. They went nuts for it and offered to help in any way possible … The budget for the trailer is bare bones. All of the money will go into makeup effects, locations, permits, and food. Everyone else involved has agreed to do this for the love of the project, and of course a sandwich or two. Then, once the trailer is filmed and edited together, we plan on showing it to investors.”
continued…
New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.
Anthony DiBlasi's movie
Dread may be compelling for folks who haven't read the
Clive Barker story that inspired it, but anyone who admires the
grand guignol audacity of that story will likely be disappointed by the film.
There's plenty to praise in the movie, though, and before I detail why I think Diblasi's screenplay tames the story and saps it of any interesting meaning, I do want to make it clear that my objection is primarily to the screenplay. The cinematography and production design are often excellent, sometimes strikingly so -- every wall in this film seems rich with texture, the colors and lighting are frequently more evocative than anything going on in the plot, and some of the framing of shots is gorgeous (what's in the frame is often grimy or grotesque, fitting the events of the story, but the image composition is nonetheless beautiful). And there's some good gore, too.
The acting isn't as bad as it could be, either, especially given some of the lines the actors have to deal with. Not having seen the
Twilight movies, I wasn't familiar with
Jackson Rathbone, but he delivers a likeable and sometimes surprising performance, quirky and light, a bit reminiscent of young Johnny Depp. The problem most of the actors face is that the script nearly requires them to seem self-indulgent, like acting students practicing audition monologues.
The problem, yes, is the script.
(Below, I'll be talking about the plot of the movie and story, including the ending. Go away now if you don't like that kind of talk.)
The original Barker story focuses primarily on the relationship between Stephen and Quaid as Quaid makes Stephen an accomplice to his ever-more-sadistic attempts to study people's fears. Stephen then becomes one of Quaid's subjects of study, this pushes him into insanity, and he becomes exactly the creature Quaid himself most feared -- and Quaid ends the story tortured, consumed by dread, yearning for the relief of death. Stephen triumphs over Quaid and achieves power, but he loses his sanity, which is his sense of himself and his knowledge of his own motivations.
In the movie, Stephen is, at the end, subjected to some of Quaid's tortures, but he doesn't go insane. He chooses to resemble something he knows (or at least strongly suspects) Quaid fears -- a man wielding an axe -- after a friend, Abby, mutilates herself in response to Quaid's taunting. Stephen feels some guilt for not better protecting Abby and for rejecting her offer of love. One of Quaid's other victims is also in the hospital, and he
is insane. He sees Stephen, remembers he was associated with Quaid, and follows him when Stephen goes to Quaid's house. The insane boy, Stephen, and Quaid stalk each other, the boy misses in his attempt to kill Quaid and instead kills Stephen, and Quaid blows the kid's brains out. Quaid then goes to another room to visit one of his other victims, Stephen's girlfriend Cheryl, who suffers the same torture she does in the story, but who has not been set free in the world as she is in the story -- instead, Quaid keeps her locked up and drops Stephen's dead body into the room with her, implying this is all he's leaving her to eat.
It's an amusing enough endi
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