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Monthly Archives: March 2012

The Bighead, by Edward Lee

Posted on March 31, 2012 by devilintheflesh

“The Bighead licked his chops and tasted the dandy things: blood and fat, pussystink, the salt-slime of his own semen that he’d just slurped out’a the dead girl’s bellybutton.”

    And so begins the first Chapter of The Bighead, by Edward Lee.

    The Bighead is considered by some to be the grossest and most extreme horror novel ever written. It is possible to set out and write a book with more quantitative gore, but that misses the point of horror, the point of pornography (of which there is plenty in this book), and the hard-to-discern point where the two meet.

   A few things about porn for those of you who don’t know it. Porn cinema came into its own in the 70′s because it was shot on film, had a budget, and took itself seriously. The eighties came along, and any unemployed idiot with a video camera could make a miserable movie that looked like it was shot in a bathtub. Cue the millenium, and porn has gone purely digital. There is no upper electronic limit to the amount of porn one can make and consume, so porn companies have to stretch the limits. A scene with one women and two men becomes one woman and two hundred men (not exaggerating here, unfortunately). In bombarding the audience with the extremes, you make it harder to impress and/or upset because you’ve participated in heightening the audience’s tolerance. The erotic aspect is gone, and it’s only gymnastics and the spectacle of watching how much the human anatomy can distend.
    
    This happens in extreme horror. Some writers look at a novel like The Bighead, and grimly and joylessly go about topping it. That’s easy. Just measure the gore that is there and write more. That is not an achievement.

    Can you make pornography dirty, but still keep it sexy and funny? Can you write a horror novel that doesn’t turn your audience off by boring them? And can you write a novel that is horrible and pornographic and yet still enjoyable?

    The plot of The Bighead is unexpectedly complex. There’s baby-switching, sexual secrets, underwater tombs, phantom religious figures, torture, a duo of redneck serial killers named Balls and Dicky, but the most important thing to know is this: a massive backwoods cannibal mutant with a fourteen-inch penis is roaming through the book, raping and killing people. Towards the end we’re told he is not exactly human, but we figured that out anyway.
    
    All the good characters are ill in some way. Of the two female protagonists, one is a sex addict and the other’s sexual issue is barely spoken of, so we know it’s going to figure greatly in the plot. The priest in the book is sexually tortured by dream nuns. The monster and the serial killer rednecks, on the other hand, are well-adjusted in their raping, torturing and killing.

    The killings go on and on. Many of the victims are extremely young(one is unborn), and that bored, numb feeling starts to creep in early. I put a little failsafe mechanism in my head: Directive – read, move on, and forget this book that I read because it was ‘seminal’, or ‘classic’.

    The larger question for a book like this: what is too little or too much? If the book only covered one murder scene apiece for the Bighead and the two rednecks, then the book would have been shocking and horrific. Lee’s approach – to describe the same rape/cannibalism scene over and over again – works like a salt overdose. Soon we’re not shocked, just bloated and not hungry anymore.
  
    I will say this. There is a strange and elemental psychology running through this book. The obsession with genital size (and that forms a big twist in the plot); the childish, almost sing-song writing in the sections that detail the rape scenes; the sexual addictions; the constants spilling of every single fluid in the human body (nothing is missed, not even eyeball fluid), reminds me not so much of extreme horror, but of a child entering the fascination phase with its own body as it learns to use the bathroom and realizes that boys and girls are different from the waist down.

    I have witnessed a child of eight who stuffed all the dirty laundry into his pajamas and joyfully ran about the house with a crotch the size of a basketball. I’ve known kids who make long-form comics about pooping heroes who fight giant pooping butts. Some parents wage war so their children might keep their hands out their pants for even five minutes at the supper table. Little kids are like this, but it is strange to see this mentality in a book written ostensibly for adults.

    Is this good? I can’t say. Is it interesting? Yes.

    But should you catch someone reading The Bighead, don’t think badly of them. I might guess that – in an completely unexpected way – they are returning to a gleeful and gross part of their childhood where few books would venture. But Ed Lee will take you there.

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My two cats

Posted on March 30, 2012 by devilintheflesh
    When I was little and had yet to graduate to the joys of dog ownership, I had three cats in a row: One that belonged to my mom while my parents were still together, and two more that were nominally mine. 

  The first was a grey cat named Pooka. Pooka was a kind, innocent little cat who would try to come into my bed at night. My father would charge in, scoop up the cat; a few moments later, through the door into the hall, I would see poor Pooka fly down the stairs in mid-air. I hoped he landed on his feet; I never knew. I became allergic, and my father sent Pooka off to live with family friends. I’m not allergic to cats an as adult and I’ve always wondered if my father was wrong. Pooka caught distemper and died; my mother said that really, he died of grief from being sent away from her.

I picked the next two cats. The first was a pure-bred siamese cat that I named Astro, after the pet dog in The Jetsons. He was loud but affectionate and I adored him.

 This is how you kept a cat back circa 1979. You fed it, gave it a litter-box, and in the morning you let it out and in the evening you called it back in. Sometimes it came home; sometimes it didn’t. If you were extra-responsible you had it neutered so it wouldn’t embarrass you or threaten your pocket-book. What it did during the day was its business and, seeing how cats have such a private, familiar, and chummy relationship with death in both the giving and receiving of it, that probably suited it just fine. 

  One day Astro never came back. We looked and looked. Either he got killed by a car or a dog, or someone cat-napped him. 

The next cat was mixed – a tabby kitten with Siamese ancestry. It was a tabby with a massive voice, and it never stopped meowing. I named him Astro the Second. 

  I don’t remember liking it, but I’m sure I did. He was nice to me during the day, but at night he would silently creep into my room, slink under the covers, and claw my bare legs. He would hiss and scratch my arm when I tried to stop him, and I would give up and cry myself to sleep. He grew bigger and bigger, and his body became rangy and confident; his attractive tabby stripes grew wider and starker and soon he looked somewhat like a miniature tiger. 

 Like his predecessor, he liked to wander and disappear all day. Like his predecessor, one day he never came back. As before I looked and looked, but he was gone.

  Several months later, we found him near my mother’s apartment. If anything, he seemed even bigger and more tigery than when he had lived inside. He looked more like a native wild cat from a temperate forest than something descended from generations of house cats. 

 My mother, being female and thus predisposed to helping, to cleaning up the messes of people like my dad and me, volunteered to take him in to her place. We bought the proper equipment: the food and water bowls, the litter box, even a little box with bedding that would please a domestic cat.

  Only he wasn’t domestic, not any more. The months of living on his own, of defending his turf, had left him edgy and paranoid, and when we took him inside he hunched down next to the wall and made this crazy growl: waaaah-waaaagh! We tried it for a few days, but we both had trouble sleeping with Astro in the house. We were afraid that whatever had kept him alive would try to get us when we slept. He wasn’t the same cat anymore, and perhaps he had never been the cat I had thought he was. 

When we let him outside for good, he went without looking back over his shoulder. Not once. We never saw him again, and I imagine the cat’s old buddy Death paid a visit to Astro and told him there was a position open in his squad for an ambitious and stripy bruiser like himself. 

 A year or two later, my mother brought an nearly full-grown Old English Sheepdog to the door, and that was when I knew I liked dogs. I’ve been that way ever since. 

  In the age of the Internet, the cat has become an avatar and an odd and ironic pagan goddess to millions. But when I was young they were these peculiar dark passengers that stayed with us for a while before leaving for other lands or other spheres of being. I won’t forget my two pets, nor the grieve-stricken little grey cat that came before, but I’ll always prefer dogs. My present dog sleeps soundly not four feet away as I type this. He’s a big black mongrel, and he’s old. He once spent the day off-leash on my front porch because I’d unwittingly locked him out, and he never ran away. 

  My two boys are animal lovers too. One is resolutely a dog person and will be all his life, while my oldest is a skinny, energetic, and moody kid who, I’m guessing, would love to share space with a temperamental creature much like himself. 

Whichever pet they pick, I hope their choice is in harmony with their respective spirits. I hope they learn to love and respect animals, and understand them better then I did at that age.


EDIT – some commenters thought the photos were of the two cats mentioned in this post. They are not; they are merely representative of those cats and look very much like them. There are photos of these cats, but those photos are physical, not digital, and are trapped in photo albums (remember those) on the other side of the continent. But these photos look very much like those original cats.  

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A list of literary (by this I mean good) horror writers

Posted on March 30, 2012 by devilintheflesh
   Literary horror, you say? Why, that subject just starts fights. And it can’t be answered. It simply can’t. It’s too subjective, and no one – not even ivory tower la-di-da literareh types – knows what ‘literary’ is. So piss off, asshole, and don’t rock the boat. Nickolaus Pacione just posted a personal ad on Craigslist, and we need to make fun of his mentally ill ass keep an eye on him for the safety of the community.  
I hear you. It’s not a fair question. You can’t expect a zombie author to write like Joyce or Nabakov; Koetzee or Lessing. You can’t expect a scene of interspecies rape and genital destruction to include conceits and metaphors that hearken back to Evelyn Waugh. You can’t expect to find VS Naipaul’s observations on history and post-colonial identity in Lovecraftian hackwork.
So let me start by saying I’m not looking for that. If I find something like that – and I have, and I’ll tell you about it later in this article – I’ll be very pleasantly surprised. 
You see, I would swear some horror writers think horror means ‘horribly written.’ The telling and never showing (‘Life was hard when he was twelve, but he was able to employ the defence mechanisms of childhood’) the passive sentences, the alliterative cliches (‘bulging biceps,’ ‘Bouncing breasts,’ ‘Beer and Bimbos’). I would be happy to read a horror novel that reads clearly and easily. And don’t tell me I just don’t ‘get’ Writer X, or I’m not open-minded enough to appreciate the dreck of Writer Y. Good writing shouldn’t be a genre, it should be a requirement.

So here it is: a list of good writers. A list of writers who know what the hell they are doing. In horror, this is what ‘literary’ mean; by necessity I make the term this broad. These writers make few egregious mistakes, and commit no boners that would get them kicked out of a first year university course. At least two of the writers on this list are undoubtedly and inarguably literary, and I’ll make no apologies for that. If there are a few of you who are new to the wonderful world of horror, but are artistically horrified by what you’ve read so far, then you can read this for a few pointers. 
1. Cormac McCarthy – Yup, you heard me. Blood Meridian is the best horror novel ever written. The Road is damn close to horror, and Child of God and Near Dark are unmistakably horror. Both Blood Meridian and No Country for Old Men feature villains that are the most frightening in literature. The heir to Melville, Faulkner, and perhaps even James Joyce (see Suttree for similarities to Ulysses), McCarthy can craft endless, labyrinthian sentences and then fill pages with taut dialogue. Judge Holden, the mighty, Gnostic, child-killing and poly-lingual lawyer, geologist, theist, and Ur-antagonist from Blood Meridian, seems to step off the page as we read the book, moonlight gleaming his bald albino head. Cormac is for neither the faint of heart or faint of mind, but he is a genius. As a bonus for the fan of extreme horror, his novels are more violent and gory than anything from the murkiest corners of the genre. 
2. Doris Lessing – Who, you ask? She won the Nobel Prize for Literature, that’s who. Actually, she’s won every prize worth winning. Her relation to horror? Her body of work is colossal, but among the tales of Africa and her science fiction, she wrote a wonderful horror novel called The Fifth Child, which was about a lovely family that gives birth to a murderous evolutionary throwback. Also, she wrote a five-novel series called The Children of Violence. I won’t insist you read it, because it is enormous; but it ends in perfectly-themed apocalypse. Her commentary on mental illness, communism, war, mutation, precognition, race, and class is second to no one. She writes like she is a minor deity cataloguing God’s creations. 
This is a small thing, but here it is. Some in the horror community defend bad writing, and instead call it ‘blue-collar writing,’ or ‘working-class writing.’ Lessing grew up rough and sunburnt in the African bush; she worked as a nursemaid and telephone operator. She’s as working class as it gets, and yet she somehow writes beautiful prose. Know who else was working-class? Herman Melville, Don Delillo, Phillip Roth, Saul Bellow. Stephen King, as well. There is no such thing as a working class or blue collar style. Writing is the great equalizer; all you need, at the very least, is a pen and a napkin, and you can write whatever you want.
3. Stephen King – Of course I’m going to mention him: the father to us all. Now sixty-four and still writing very well, he doesn’t seem to be slowing down. His last novella collection was some of his best work in decades. His writing is deceptively brilliant; one only has to read his early collection Night Shift to see the brilliant and effortless economy with words. He is the definitive horror master who has done more than anyone to bring the real into the horrible. Pet Sematary, one of his less successful books, is perhaps his saddest and most horrifying, and full of commentary on pride, gender, and the elemental in all of us. ‘Salem’s Lot, his take on the classic vampire tale, is also about the metaphorical death of a small town. Most importantly, when he writes something, you have to read it. You have no choice. Anyone who reads King knows exactly what I’m saying, even if few know why. Keep at it, Steve, and long may you live and reign, Your Horrific Majesty. 
4. T.E.D. Klein – he’s written two collections and one novel. Pathetic, really – he has writer’s block. But that tiny body of work is dark, frightening; he is one of those writers who can really unnerve a reader. Much like in Lovecraft, his character are helpless before faceless powers, great mysteries, terrifying coincidences, and vague threats. His short stories are elaborately crafted pieces, and his novel is one long soak in fear and unease. Petey, from the Dark Gods collection, is a technical standout. Look for his work in second-hand stores (in New York in particular), and online. 
5. Laird Barron – another Lovecraftian. His command of language, his obsessive descriptions of creatures that are somehow both cosmic and spiritual, make him a worthy addition to this list. From his first collection The Imago Sequence, read Hallucigenia. After you are done, google ‘hallucigenia sparsa’, and prepare to be creeped out. His stories are well-researched to craft that vague but intricate and intentional feeling of black science and insane genius. His characters are almost always male, alone, and struggling with insanity. I think Lovecraft was writing about insanity throughout his career but didn’t know it; that’s another post. 
Barron has written a novel, but it is available by mail, bound in the finest Corinthian leather, and it costs a small fortune. While Barron is a fine writer, I won’t buy something like that in a world where I can buy Lolita for a buck at the second-hand store.
6. Glen Hirschberg – A writer of lovely prose. His work isn’t that scary; The Two Sams, while affecting and wonderfully done, doesn’t grip the reader by the metaphorical balls. Struwwelpeter is suspenseful for a few moments and then only alludes to awful and frightening events in the future. I’d like to see more from Hirschberg before I let him become one of my favorites. But he’s good, no mistake. I want to check out his novels.
7. Tom Piccirilli – I’ve always liked his work, but The Shadow Season really knocked me over. It reads simple, but the threads of disappointment and regret mix in with the suspense to create a novel that is precise yet somehow hallucinatory as well. Picirilli is prolific, and always willing to chat on his blog and on message boards. I’m going to read a lot more of his work in the future. 
8. Joe Schreiber – The only writer I’ve ever encountered who comes close to Stephen King for breezy, easy, and yet incredibly rare ease of writing. His work is unquestionably horror, and I have no idea why he isn’t more successful. My favourite is No Doors, No Windows. His plots and set-ups, like King, are not original; it’s how he does it. Look out for this guy. 
I have a few more to add, or not add, to this list. I’ve got Glen Duncan’s The Last Werewolf waiting to be read, and I’ve also got Dave Zeltserman’s The Caretaker of Lorne Field. I’m looking forward to the Duncan, because it’s got some real literary cred. The Zeltserman – not so much. The cost of the ebook was ridiculous, and the reviews are suspiciously enthusiastic. 
More to come on this subject. 

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If a Zombie Apocalypse were to really happen (I mean really)

Posted on March 30, 2012 by devilintheflesh

    I thought I was done with the Walking Dead.

But then I saw the line-up for the Toronto After Dark Film Festival. A civil war zombie apocalypse movie and a zombie comedy in which the main characters are wise-cracking zombies. To be honest, Exit Humanity, the civil war movie set in the 1800′s(but with zombies!), looked well done.

So I’m going to tell you what would happen if the zombie plague really happened. By this, I mean the classic scenario: millions of shambling, moaning corpses; they only die from headshots; the infection spreads through bites.

The cities would do well. No, they would, sorry. Modern cities are full of secure condominium complexes, police stations, brick schools, historic forts, and army bases. Some cities have underground tunnels connecting underneath the financial districts, and each section has its own armoured doors. Many are near ocean shores. A few, like Montreal and Richmond, British Columbia, are islands. You know what else are in cities? Banks. Huge, secure, armoured buildings, several of which are on every busy street. Central branches are even bigger. We would hide in those places. Could a bunch of drooling dead idiots use their rotting fists to break down the door of a bank?

The country folks? They have guns, room to manoeuvre, and the privilege of seeing the zombies come from a long distance away. There might be a few massacres as some communities get caught unaware (I’m thinking of the Quakers, who would have neither guns to defend themselves or radios or TV from which to hear of the threat). But on the balance the country folks would be fine.

The cities would mobilize, thanks to the police and army. That other trope of zomb-lit – that of the real monsters coming out of hiding when all the humans are trapped in one place? Bull. Remember the Japan Earthquake, 9-11, the subway bombings in London? Humans stick together and help each other when the going gets tough.

Once the world’s leaders understand the nature of the threat, they release an edict by text, Email, Radio, and TV: Every living person should endeavour to kill at least one zombie. The math works.

The third world? That might be different: an enormous, dense population, fewer places to hide, smaller land mass, a higher prevalence of disease. The body count could could be brutally high. There I could see the million-plus herds of zombies form, like in the ZA Recht novels, heading en masse towards African and Mid-eastern cities.

Here’s where the colonial legacy comes through: US army bases in the Mid-east, Africa, the Phillipines. A single Apache gunship could take out an entire herd. Look at the night-vision videos from Apache attacks in Iraq – they’re on Youtube.  The they-only-die-from-headshots trope is meaningless in the presence of bullets that rip apart the human body. Battleships with cannons with twenty-mile ranges, jets with smart bombs and guided missiles, Abrams tanks that could simply steamroll the walking dead without even bothering to use ordinance. Massed hordes of slow-moving dead people would be powerless in the face of modern weaponry.

Winter would arrive in the Northern countries: zombies would be reduced to almost motionless, desiccated hulks. Dead or not, human tissue dries and contracts in cold. In northern Canada, they would freeze solid. The First World would be free to send mop-up UN troops to the hotter countries. It might be beginning of unintentional colonialism, but that’s another novel.

The plague would subside once the world understands that the brainstems of the newly-dead must be destroyed. There would be terrible economic damage. The publishing world would be swept by Zombie non-fiction; Zombie documentaries and movie treatments of the plague would sweep the Oscars.

But in the end we would be fine. We’d survive. No survival-of-the-fittest, Desperados-roaming-the blasted-landscape; no last holdouts. We’d be fine because we’re human, because we’re organized.

We humans have made it to space, explored the north and south poles, cut canals through continents. We’ve invented democracy and vaccines; we’ve split the atom, gone to the moon, invented quantum theory; we’ve gone through a real plague.

Would we really go down so easily before the Walking Dead? I can’t see it happening.

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Atheism and Christopher Hitchens

Posted on March 30, 2012 by devilintheflesh

    Christopher Hitchens was more than an atheist. If your regular workaday atheist was a cook, he was a profanity-spewing rageoholic rockstar chef. He was what he termed an anti-theist. He was not content to let the religious life and history play out around him – he wanted it down.


   I heard a old radio interview with him last week. He used logic and words to tear up the polite assumptions of organized religion: that we must start with a gentle and undeserved awarding of respect to the religious people we debate. He wanted the murder, the subjugation of third-world countries, the rape of children and the cover up of those rapes, to begin the debate. He thought it a fallacy that religious instruction should be inspire good works – any good work can come from choice, but religions has inspired great deeds of violence where none had come before. He said that in the future, the tribal desert religions will bring the world to the ‘knife edge of extinction.’ I’m inclined to agree with all these statements. I won’t bring in the things he wrote about the Iraq war, or the general ineptness of female comedians or the state of women’s humour in general – he was a drunk, and although he was the sort of drunk people admired and wanted to emulate (but not really), I think that many of his more outrageous positions were written in a flammable fog of alcohol and nicotine.


   But… if what he wanted and dreamed came to pass, what’s left over? What do we do with the grand buildings, paintings, tapestries? Well, those are physical things of value, and they’ll be sold off. They’ll be the homes and prize possessions of hedge fund managers, pharma-execs, or legalized marijuana kings – whoever will be making the most money.
 
  Those are the physical things. What about the ephemeral – the concepts, the thinking, the logic, the seats of learning that came alongside religious institutions in which many great atheists hid, the music? What’s to become of the music?


   I can’t stand secular Christmas music, most of which was written in places where snow has never fallen. I have to have my carols, my Messiah(but only the highlights), my motets from the Renaissance era, my Mahler symphonies, my Faure and Verdi Requiems. What’s to become of In the Deep Midwinter, which if you’ve never heard it is the finest Christmas carol ever written. Here’s the first verse. Never mind the music; just feast your eyes on the words.

In the Deep Midwinter, frosty wind made moan
Earth stood hard as iron, water like a stone,
Snow hath fallen snow on snow, snow on snow,
In the Deep Midwinter, long ago.

   I shiver when I hear those words every year. 

   This is how I see it: if you’re going to do something else besides work, play, eat, and make little you’s, you’re going to think of the ephemeral. You’re going to think of immaterial things, and sometimes you may passionately refer to things that don’t exist – stories, places, things, magical Kingdoms, all-powerful men with Abrahamic beards who watch over us all. We might be at our most impassioned and unrestrained when we write, paint, and compose while thinking of these ephemerals. 

Do I make you horny?
  Hitchens wanted us to rely on Literature as our saving grace, the thing that provides us our ephemerals. I’m okay with that – the deconstruction of Joyce, Nabokov, Shakespeare, Blake, and Yeats is all fine with me. I’m not above that sort of thing myself. But for some of us don’t want to rely on the authors of Literature for our ephemerals – authors and writers, after all, are famously fallible. They smoked and drank, whored, beat their wives, had terrible hygiene, and often engaged in shameful feuds with other writers. If the writers of of our ephemeral are going to be the fellows we look up to, they’re going to have to be better than that if regular people are expected to rely on them instead of the bible. 

This is probably why we have God, Jesus, Saints, and The Greatest Story Ever Told. We have to have just the stories, the holy texts, almost as though they were sui generis – traditional fiction and criticism just isn’t going to cut it. Sure, I love Phillip Larkin’s poetry, and I think his efficient paeans to realism and atheism should be read by everybody. But Phillip Larkin was a misogynistic, porn-loving librarian, and not a saint with his ears to the heavens. Most people want an ur-story that leaves out the messy personal details. Literature is not going to do that; religion will and does. 

  So while I agree with Hitchens in regards to my own personal journey, I don’t think anything he or Richard Dawkins wrote have made much difference, aside from making people like themselves and me a little more accepted. People still want a story, the sort you can hear again and again, while gathered around the fire, or the great stone building where they tell the great tales. When we can manufacture a great and immortal secular tale that outlives and beggars the existence of its creator, or if a great and monumental event occurs that doesn’t involve the supernatural, then we can start making our own narrative that goes beyond that small space in the Mid-east where everything started, and just might end… for all of us. 

  I think we can do it. Before we reach Hitchens’s ‘knife edge of extinction.’

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The Blair Witch Project (1999)

Posted on March 30, 2012 by devilintheflesh
      The Blair Witch Project came out in 1999. My wife and I saw it in the theatre, and this was before we had kids and were able to fully appreciate this piece of art.
    Why call it art? Because a small group of people with little money made something amazing, that spawned a whole host of imitators (Paranormal Activity, Cloverfield, and many others), that was able to create something in our minds that was forever off camera. I’m not revealing anything when I tell you that no one ever sees the Witch. That’s not the point. The movie would have been a straight-to-video crap-fest if at the end a witch appeared in a low-cut dress and a lot of black eye-shadow. 
   The movie first tells us that three kids went into the woods to shoot a documentary. They were never found, but their film was. The makers of the movie put the footage together. Of course we don’t believe that, but the movie is trying hard and so we happily suspend our disbelief. An audience is ecstatic when this is easy. 
Very small hands made these bloody handprints. 
    The film begins with the three scruffy filmmakers (Heather Donahue, Michael C. Williams and Joshua Leonard)coming to Burkitsville, Maryland, to shoot a documentary on the Blair Witch. A hermit murdered several children in the woods in the 1940’s and he insisted that the spirit of Elly Kedward, a witch who was hanged in the 18th century, made him do it. An important detail – he made one child stand in the corner, face to the wall, while he murdered the other. 
    They enter the woods to shoot footage of Coffin Rock, where five men were found murdered in the 19th century. It is at this point that the movie takes off.
Heather doing a stand-up before going camping. 
   Later, the details came out about how the movie was made. The actors are holding the cameras because this is their documentary. One of the directors had military experience, and at night he used this to harass the actors in their tents. Little notes were left for the actors telling them the general flow of the story, but otherwise things were to be improvised. From the production side, the movie appears to be a staged and elaborate practical joke in which the victims have knowledge, but only a partial knowledge, of what it going on. Throughout the movie the actors address themselves by their real names, and I would imagine this helped demolish walls of artifice.  
   Those are the technical details. After shooting, the footage was edited for eight months straight. A lot of footage must have went straight in the garbage. 
   The finished product is magical. At night, something shakes the walls of their tents and the filmmakers scream. They’re not acting. At one point, Heather points the camera at her face inside the tent and tearfully emotes her fear. She can barely speak because she’s breathing so hard. All the veracity of a documentary has been captured and channelled into horror artifice. 
    When one of the filmmakers is kidnapped, the movie shifts gears and appears to head downhill. The viewer can sense death waiting patiently at the bottom, confident that these young people have no chance. At night, the kidnapped man is heard screaming horribly in the dark, and in the light of day Heather and Mike find his blood and teeth (which have been planted there by the directors). 
     The climax, which I won’t reveal, is perfect. The sickening sense of impending, onrushing death, of humans reduced to prey as something chases them and toys with them, is masterfully engendered, and more real than the most sophisticated CGI. And we never see anything. It’s all done with cuts, noises, and screaming. Money does not enter into the equation. 
     I’ve seen this movie twice. Once in the theatres (at the end everyone left in a grim silence), and once by myself when my wife was out and my kids were sleeping upstairs. That was a big mistake. 
   My little fantasy. I want to show this movie to my kids when they’re older. I think fifteen or sixteen will be a good age. I want to invite their know-it-all too-cool friends along as well, and I’ll tell them I have this strange documentary made in the nineties. The film footage was found in the woods and the film-makers were never found. But you should watch it; it’s very… interesting. I’ll take away their phones so they won’t figure out the joke. These are kids who will have watched hard-core porn and decapitation videos on the internet. I think it’s time they experience some old-fashioned terror. 
    Then I’ll sit down beside them, re-live it, and be thankful. 
  

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Five quick Zombie book reviews

Posted on March 29, 2012 by devilintheflesh
So here’s another zombie post, in which I review a total of fourteen different zombie novels (and a comic book series.) I still have Colson Whitehead’s Zone One and Simon Clark’s Blood Crazy to review, and I will get on that soon.
But without further ado, here are five more works of zombie fiction reviewed by me. Enjoy.



Down the Road -Bowie Ibarra : In the first portion of the book, a high school teacher tries to escape the zombie plague, deliberately drives over and kills a police officer, returns to his school and has porn sex with one of his co-workers, and becomes imprisoned in a POW-style camp inexplicably run by FEMA, which has become a gang of stormtrooper thugs. The book is nasty, terribly written, and brims over with the author’s hatred of authority and government. Only interesting because it might help explain the zombie-fiction lover’s urge to see a world where all rules have vanished. One minor saving grace: author has a cool name.
The Rising – Selected Scenes from the End of the World, by Brian Keene : I was in no way impressed with The Rising, the source book for this thing, which could be called Thirty-two short stories about the Siqqism. It’s a compendium of grim, depressing fragments taken from around the world as the unbeatable demon plague of corpse possession hits the planet. But when these extremely short stories are not mawkishly sentimental (two little girls avoiding the zombs and making for their magical secret clubhouse; doesn’t that make you just want to barf), or full of laboured Keene mythos explanations (which read like those sections of the Old Testament that list polysyllabic names and diet restrictions) these stories can be pretty funny.
A young man keeps a zombie prisoner so he can bore it to death with movie-talk. A zombie hates the body he inhabits; it gets worse when he becomes trapped in its severed head. A ghost directs a gang of zombies to destroy the people who raped and killed his family. My personal favourite – one of those pragmatic, outdoorsy Northern Europeans discovers a way to avoid the zombies and stay alive: move to the cold, corpse-freezing mountains and resort to cannibalism! As far as zombie fiction goes, this book is not bad at all. It’s never boring and it reads quickly.
The Walking Dead, Compendium One, by Robert Kirkman – I got this baby last Christmas, and I live in fear of the day my eight year-old sneaks it out of my nightstand. It’s the inspiration for the hit TV series, if there are a few people out there who didn’t know that. This massive, heavy book combines issues one through forty-eight of the comic book series. It follows the trials of a small group of survivors as they navigate the landscape and try to find a place to live. They try forests, seemingly deserted suburbs, fortified farms, and in perhaps the most brilliant use of metaphor in any work of zombie fiction, a maximum security penitentiary.
Wow. This is how zombie fiction should be done. The zombies are absolutely typical rotters – dead, shambling, vulnerable to headshots. The book focuses on how humans react to be trapped, being on the run, how they deal with hopelessness, fatigue, grief, hatred, insanity, and the infinitesimally rare dust-motes of happiness. The author treats the zombies as a natural phenomenon, and so they become as much a plot device as a storm or tsunami.
The book is well-done, but unrelentingly grim and full of death. Characters to whom the reader grows attached die in terrible and humiliating ways. You can almost taste the sweat, the desperation, and the danger. They’d be better off launching a full-on war of extermination against the zombies rather than stay cooped up inside staring at each other all day. It’s epic and fascinating just as a highly detailed account of Word War II is. Robert Kirkman is a fine storyteller who knows instinctively what works – he’s not writing zombie fiction; he’s writing a fabulous story that happens to use zombies as a plot device. The real story is us. It always is and has been.
My one and only mild complaint – visually, the drawing made it hard to discern between characters who looked similar to begin with: blonde women, and caucasian men with facial stubble.
Empire, by David Dunwoody – It’s 2112, and the undead have been up and active for over a century. The government has given up on coastal cities and towns, drawing in its borders towards the heartland. Death himself, riding a white horse and wielding a scythe, has come to the town of Jefferson Harbour. There’s a rich maniacal mad scientist with a brigade of zombie henchman, one of whom is his dead father with the head of a Doberman sewn on top of his body. Sounds like a great concept, doesn’t it?
This book did not work for me at all. I had a hard time getting through it, or even caring about anybody or anything. I found it irregular – flashes of good vivid writing, and then I couldn’t keep my eyes on the page.
Clearly there is a trick to writing – an author has to write so that the images translate directly into a reader’s mind; he has to write prose that does not magnetically repel your eyeballs away from the page. This did not happen here.
Like I said, it’s a good concept. Death plays in interesting role (although he is far too physically vulnerable), and at the end there is another adversary introduced who will likely play a big part in the sequel. Which I will not read, because the presentation lacked in the first book. I did my best to get into it, I really did!
Day by Day Armageddon, by JL Bourne – This was an unexpected surprise. I’d seen this book in the stores, and viewed it as ‘yet another zombie book.’
It is, in that the zombies do their usual thing: shambling, moaning, making the world dangerous, all the usual things, yadda yadda. But it’s the how that works here.
The main character is a young military man. He begins a daily journal just as the zombie plague begins.
What makes this book work is the military lore. The author seems to know about guns, the army, and how to fly planes. He makes an interesting point – that soldiers would do well in the zombie plague, not because of their combat skills, but because they have better early access to world-wide communications; they know where the bases, weapons caches, and fuel depots are; and they’ve been taught how to prepare for the worst. They know how to conserve, to divide and prioritize rations. This keeps this book interesting and lively, even if the reader is stuck wondering how the poor civilians are faring.
One rare instance of genre outside-the-box thinking: when governments nuke cities fallen to the walking dead, the radiation protects the re-animated flesh from rot much the same way as irradiated produce, thus prolonging the threat.
I’m going to read more of this series. It works and it’s exciting.

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Review: Chronicle (2012)

Posted on March 29, 2012 by devilintheflesh
Chronicle, the new movie directed by Josh Trank, is a clever almagam of Alan Moore’s Miracleman and Stephen King’s Carrie. It could have used the self-conscious, wincingly hip approach of the latest Marvel comics movies, but it chooses story and depth instead. 
The movie begins with Andrew, a horribly awkward high school boy. His dad is an unemployed drunk and his mother is dying of what looks like Cystic Fibrosis. Andrew has no support; he is a statistical accident waiting to happen. Andrew buys an old shoulder-mounted camera to put a wall between him and the world he observes. Through his camera, we see Andrew’s handsome and brainy cousin Matt, his school, the bullies who make his life miserable, and the drug dealers who loiter outside Andrew’s house. 
One night, when Andrew takes his camera to a rave, he meets Steve, an athlete and budding politician, who persuades Andrew to take the camera down a strange cavern he and Matt have discovered in the woods. There’s something strange in there: a crystalline entity, device, or spaceship, that irradiates the three young men. Strange otherworldly sounds emanate from it; the boys touch it, wonder at it. The camera begins to malfunction.
When Andrew gets a new camera and begins recording again, the three boys, now fast friends, have developed nascent telekinetic powers. At first, they play dumb jokes: they remove gum from unwitting stranger ’s mouths, chase little girls with animated teddy bears, pull up girls’ skirts. Steve makes the obvious mental leap: If you can manipulate physical objects, why not your own body? In a breathtaking sequence reminiscent of Richard Donnner’s Superman, the three friends take to the sky. But it’s not an ethereal sequence: up above the clouds, the wind howls and they have to wear their hoods pulled tight around their faces. They fly fast as planes and pass and shoot a football back and forth, screaming in joy. 
For a little while, all is perfect and ideal. The three friends plan trips to Mali and Tibet, make touchingly earnest plans to improve Andrew’s social status and get him laid, and have the time of their lives. 
But nothing is ever perfect. Wherever power and beauty go, chaos and anger follow. As the powers of the three boys are representative of young, impulsive maleness in the bloom of puberty, Andrew’s dark side, his previous lack of friends and his father’s inability to provide, his sexual insecurity, his fear of never being special, explodes and his own power, far greater than his two friends, becomes a threat. 
I won’t reveal what happens next, although I’m sure you know. But no plot device is ever utilized cheaply: All characters, no matter what they do, are sympathetic and understandable. We are taught that power used only to destroy and hurt makes the user more lonely and sad than before. Like King’s Carrie, we see power mixed with angry youth, and like Moore’s Miracleman, we see a hero faced with destroying an angry young boy so the world might be saved. Chronicle goes from the Facebook digital age straight into breathtaking comic drama of the best kind, for comics satisfy our need for myth and the impossible. 

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Henry, Portrait of a Serial Killer (which I watched after dental surgery)

Posted on March 29, 2012 by devilintheflesh
When I was just eighteen years old, the dentist said my wisdom teeth had to come out. He showed me an X-ray – they were at an odd angle to the my molars, and the roots looked like tangled and greasy hair tickling the inner recess of my mouth.
My father heard this and went ballistic. He had a strange and countrified fear of doctors and dentists that seemed both religious and pagan, and he said this was a make-profit scam for the oral surgeon. As I write this, my father has almost finished a complete dental reconstruction to the tune of $60,000 Canadian, because, for the past decade, his yellowish-black teeth had been falling out at night and he’d been finding them on his pillow. I think I made the right decision when I agreed to get them the hell out.
There are a number of ways to do wisdom teeth extraction. I suppose if one were a really tough mofo, you could get a local and sit there like a boss while the surgeon yanked away and blood poured out of you. In most cases you are put completely asleep under a general anaesthetic, and wake up later.
I would have gone under, but the son of one of my mother’s colleagues had died during a routine surgery. He’d been killed by the general anaesthetic and she was terrified that the decision to take out my wisdom teeth might lead to my death, so we went for the middle ground. I would get a large dose of local anaesthetic to numb my jaw, and then I would get a intravenous drip of valium. I wouldn’t go to sleep but I would be high as a kite.
I don’t remember much of the operation. Even though the surgeon’s hands were in my mouth the whole time, I talked to him constantly. He even drilled a hole through one tooth, looped a length of string through, and then pulled it out of my head. Afterwards I was taken to where my mother was waiting, and I plopped down into the seat and began to flirt with a pretty girl who was likely about to suffer the same fate. I was led to the car, taken home, where I collapsed and slept for the rest of the evening and through the night.
The next day I subsided on berry milkshakes. I had a prescription of Percocet which I was afraid to use (Not sure why; perhaps I had a fear of addiction), and nothing but time to recover. My mother suggested I watch a few movies. What movies did I want to see? she asked me. Get Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer, I said.
————————————
Released in 1990, Henry tells the story of killer and drifter Henry(Michael Rooker), who hooks up with a man named Otis(Tom Towles). Henry is a full-time killer, and in between socializing with Otis and Otis’s sister, he kills a lot of people.
At the time, it was considered the movie to get if you liked violent movies, and not the preachy, moralizing violent movies that always had to serve some parables alongside. Henry was done on a shoestring, and everyone in the movie seems like an amateur, except Michael Rooker, who – with his inbred cheekbones, dull eyes, and voice that sounded like it wasn’t used to talking with living people – seemed like a real-life serial killer who had been hired by anscrupulous director. The movie looked cheap, and today it looks as cheap as the beheading videos out of Iraq. It cost $110,000 to make and it was hailed as being real and important.
It was based on serial killer Henry Lee Lucas, who was reputed to have killed hundreds of people, but was probably lying about most and was convicted of eleven. Further estimations have suggested that he only ever killed three people, which seems like nothing if you are velocitized by his initial numbers. Both the real-like Henry and the fictional Henry seem to sub-human drifters who kill as easily and as thoughtlessly as some people smoke cigarettes or chop down trees. This is important – for anyone who ever wondered why some of these guys do it, these films can help a little. If you look at serial killers pragmatically enough, you can see them as brutal, shallow men who don’t think too deeply about what they’re doing.
This is the movie I watched the day after I got my wisdom teeth yanked. I was glad to see it, but I was disappointed: I expected more gore, more sensationalism. I was expecting Darth Vader evil, and instead I got Bubba and Cletus going human-hunting. Evil is often banal.

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The Equinox Yoga ad

Posted on March 29, 2012 by devilintheflesh


I have a confession to make.

I do yoga. Been doing it for a couple of years. Love it. It’s changed my life and made me younger (not that I’m that old to begin with, but it’s nice to feel younger.)

There are many advantages to doing yoga: You’re not beholden to monthly gym fees, you can choose to practice (you call it practicing) at home, you don’t even have to buy a mat if you have a carpet that your hands can grip, you learn to put your mind at peace, and you get asscheeks of steel. 

I first learned yoga from doing P90X, a set of fitness routines by Tony Horton. In the middle of all the push-ups and pull-ups, the lunging and kicking, I finally decided to do the YogaX routine that he’d put together. “YogaX will work your weak spots,” he orates into the camera at the beginning. “A lot of people are going to say, ‘Man, I don’t want to do no yoga. It’s weird and it’s creepy and they do these crazy Oms at the end.’ Just expand your mind and do something new. I can do things at the age of forty-five not because I do pull-ups…. it’s because I do yoga.” Here he performs a remarkable alpha-male, infomercial nod, and then the routine starts.  

An hour and a half later I was drenched in swear and moaning like a sick baby. I was sore for four days. Clearly, yoga was something I needed to explore. 

So I bought some more DVD’s, looked up all sorts of routines and master teachers on youtube, (such as David Swenson and Mary Villella). I practiced and practiced, got lean and toned, and noticed my stride becoming longer and my running becoming much easier. I was able to look behind myself without shifting on my heels.

Yoga means ‘Union.’ All the poses are generally described by their Sanskrit terms: Dandasana, Uttanasana, Pavritta parshvakonasana (the side-angle pose, a great pose for toning the legs and stretching the back and hips). You start with the Sun Salutations (Suriya Namaskara), which are basically glorified burpees, and then move into the standing poses: lunges, twists, side-stretches, all while doing Ujjayi breath (which is essentially breathing through your nose, while constricting your throat as if you were whispering). Immense heat builds in your body as the breath generates friction: Just try it… breath in deeply, constrict your throat as if you were about to whisper, and then expel that breath through that slightly smaller space in your throat. You will immediately feel slightly warmer. Now do it for an hour and while stretching and working every muscle in your body. You finish with stretching and some relaxation poses, then finally the corpse pose (during which you breath and sometimes nap). This was all great. Then I went to a yoga class. 

This was a huge awakening. As I was male, I was immediately asked: “Have you ever done yoga before?” This was said with an easy and somewhat pitying smile. A lot of yoga teachers do this; I call it  the look of Affectionate Disdain. 

“Sure,” I said. “I’ve done Tony Horton’s routine a lot. It’s got a killer abs section.”

“Ooh,” said the teacher, and again did that same smile with which I was yet to become familiar. “Killer.” 

So here I am, a large, somewhat hirsute male, in a room full of women who are bending over in my face. I’m desperate to: (a) look like I know what I’m doing, (b) try not to look at these behinds, some of which I would swear are winking at me as they go into Downward Dog (Adho Mukha Svanasana). Yoga makes my body younger and slimmer, but yoga makes women’s bodies beautiful. It tones the glute muscles but also the stabilizer muscles around the hips, and the result is an incredibly well-rounded butt.  It targets the shoulders, the back, the obliques. Pretty much everything. Watch kids in a playground – they way they wrestle, crawl about the ground, haul themselves up ladders. Yoga works and stretches the body in the same way. 

After I went a few times, I got used to it and they got used to me. I didn’t leer, although in my head I had but no choice to acknowledge the beauty around me (and much of yoga’s philosophy is about acknowledgement of all kinds). 

My favorite teacher, a forty-something woman with the physique of a young gymnast, has a little saying she uses at the end of each class. “The Light in me acknowledges the Light in you.” This is nice, and it works because it is pleasant without being overly cloy and invasive. 

I’ve taken a few more classes, learned some new things, and now I’ve become aware of  yoga and how it’s changed since coming to North American shores. Lululemon (I’ve got Lululemon mats, shorts, shirts, and even underwear. Everyone’s got at least one pair of the famous tights with the built-in sash), karma payment for classes, psychedelic mats, Baptiste style, Anusara style, Mysore style.  It’s become a way of life, but not in the way of the very devout and serious religious yogis in India; yoga in North America has become about Om tramp-stamps, designer metal water-bottles, footwear, Toms shoes. Woman want the ‘coveted yoga body,’ which I can understand; I really do. Like everything we North Americans have appropriated, we’ve taken yoga, mined it, melted and sculpted it, and turned it into a lifestyle product. Because the only thing we North Americans can’t control is life, so we’ve turned to LifeStyle. Yoga, now a union between longevity, youthfullness, beauty, and earnestness, is the perfect lifestyle product.

Of the many debates in the yoga community (for adherents of a philosophy about union, yogis and yoginis like to argue a lot), the latest is the ad for Equinox gyms, a high-concept, upper-class chain that has released a youtube ad that features yoga. 

A yogini by the name of Briohny Smyth (She’s also a big music star in Thailand) does yoga in a Manhattan penthouse as her lover sleeps in bed. She’s dressed in lingerie, and the wind is rushing in and blowing about the curtains. Her body is… amazing. What I said about what yoga does to women’s bodies is very much in evidence here. Her yoga is more advanced than most people practicing on this planet. See for yourself and try to keep your jaw from dropping to the floor.



Calm and collected again? Right, let’s talk about this. 

There’s been a little friction among other yoga practitioners about this ad: they say it’s gratuitous, that it commodifies yoga into a product that is about profit and sex. Gratuitous? I looked that word up (you should look up all over-used words), and it didn’t really fit the definition. Is it about profit and sex? Well, since most men watching the ad are dreaming about getting their paws on Briohny Smith, and most women want to get a body like hers so men will want them as much as they want her, then hell, yes, it’s about sex. That’s not a bad thing. Profit? Well, Equinox has to sell gym memberships. 

Here’s the problem I have. You need to see the same teacher for years on end, and you need to practice at home a lot; every day, in face. Briohny Smith may have made a trip to the Pune Institute in India, where yoga drill sergeants make sure you do it right or you have to clean the temple with a toothbrush. The ad by Equinox Gyms make you want to do yoga, lust after a devout practitioner of yoga as well as a penthouse apartment in Manhattan with a sexy bedroom, but nowhere in that ad is anything that might persuade you to buy gym memberships. Equinox tried a concept, and did it beautifully, but they did not connect that concept to a product. So this ad is a fail. 

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