But this morning, someone surfed a wave that was almost as big. Or maybe it’s bigger; I can’t tell. But it’s an amazing picture from Nazaré, Portugal. It looks like that surfer is going to crash into the that sea wall!

Before everyone goes nuts, it’s fake. Completely. Here is the original, which is basically an add for wall decorations.

Just a two novels I’ve read recently. One was a very pleasant surprise.

1. Those Across the River – Christopher Buehlman

This novel was an enormous surprise. It’s hard to find beautifully written horror, but Buehlman has done it. Before he was a novelist (or a successful novelist at least) he was a noted poet and a actor who specialized in renaissance theatre.

It’s 1935. Frank Nichols, failed academic, married to a women he stole from a colleague, has fled to the small town of Whitbrow to recover from his mistakes, his post-traumatic stress disorder from the war, and ostensibly write a novel on a long-lost relative who died in a plantation slave rebellion.

But Whitbrow is an odd place. Strange religions rituals, a part of the woods no one ever goes, a strange naked boy in the woods. The town has a deep secret of which it might not even be aware.

This is a well-made novel with fabulous, terse dialogue, fine historical detail, and the atmosphere of post-war, racist America feels natural and real. I won’t get into the plot too much, but it almost takes a back seat to the inner life of the protagonist, and the finely-woven tapestry of a small Southern town. That isn’t to say it’s not scary – there’s a scene in the woods which is equal to anything by Stephen King. Think Hemingway mixed with a little Stephen King.

Get this book now and support great writing. The genre needs it.

2. The House of Skin – Jonathan Janz

Paul Carver has inherited a fabulous estate from a long-lost relative. Of course, it’s haunted by the world’s most shrewish and murderous dead wife, who has no intention of staying dead.

Carver meets a beautiful young woman named Julia, who has already murdered a would-be rapist, and together they have to face the frightening spector of Annabel Carver, wife of Myles Carver.

Many people compare this novel to the works of late and lamented goremeister Richard Laymon. I think it’s closer to John Farris, most notably his novel Disturb Not the Dream, with the backstories and the looming sense of repeating history, although without the Farris’s creepy sexiness.

It’s a fine novel, easy-to-read, with generous slatherings of tasty pulp. A welcome addition.

Notice that’s he’s browner?

I don’t think Mitt Romney is a bad person. Or maybe I don’t know whether he is or is not a bad person. But I don’t think Mitt Romney knows either.

In 1994, during his campaign for the senate, he wrote an infamous letter to The Log Cabin Republican, a group of gay fiscal conservatives. While he didn’t outright state that he was for marriage, he did write that he wanted full equality for gays and lesbians. When that letter was brought up as a weapon against his social conservative bona fides, he could only say that he was tailoring the letter to its recipients. In other words, he was telling them what he wanted to hear.

Earlier this week, he was caught insulting half his country’s population. He was secretly videoed at a $50,000 a plate fundraiser, where many of the guests were doubtlessly rich republicans. Did the ‘Massachusetts Moderate’ really believe all that stuff about moochers and freeloaders? I don’t know, and perhaps Mitt doesn’t know either. I think he may have been telling the rich folks what he wanted to hear.

And last, but not least. Here is a picture of him on Univision, a spanish-language TV station. He appears to be wearing brown toner on his face, which makes his skin look… darker. More like the audience that might be watching the show. The mind boggles.

Barring Obama making a colossal mistake, Romney is going to lose. He will disappear, and go back to ripping the guts out of companies and sending work overseas. We’ll forget about him, and maybe by then he’ll have figured out who he is. I sure as hell don’t know who he is.

Here is a the story of a nerdy, single, milquetoast goblin – a day in the life of a put-upon wage slave. The lovely twist of this whole video is…. well, just watch it. And watch how it finally heads into genre territory at the end.

And since I’m in a very strange mood ( a very good mood actually – some very fine family-related news came my way and I am as pleased as punch), here is a picture of a hairy teenage girl cuddling a hybrid between a baby and a foot.

Priest (2011) is what I had hoped was a movie treatment of Garth Ennis’s Priest. There are several similarities: vampires, a priest with a cross embossed on his forehead, and a tall, unstoppable man with a cowboy hat and slicker who looks suspiciously like the Saint of Killers. But there the resemblance ends. It’s a completely different story.

In this universe, Earth has been ravaged by centuries of war between vampires and humans. Humans won by becoming a theocracy: a Catholic-run state that used super-soldier priests to gain the upper hand and push the vamps back into special reserves. Meanwhile, humanity has disappeared behind the walls of fortified religious cities and lives in dystopian squalor. The priests, no longer needed, have become useless and ignored.

A horde of vampires attacks a farm outside the cities, killing the parents and kindnapping the daughter. The daughter’s uncle, a priest living in Cathedral City (sector twelve), breaks his vows (which have become nothing more than just obeying the all-powerful monsignors) and leaves the city to rescue his niece.

Vampires are a different breed here: more like rejects from the Doom video game – eyeless and larval things that move with the speed of sound. But now they have a half-human, half-vampire priest (he’s the guy who looks like the Saint of Killers) who can walk during the day, and he’s become a vampire Bin Laden, organizing a bloodsucker commuter train through the outside settlements and into Cathedral City. The vampires build massive hives (think of the Doom video game) out of their own slimy secretions (Think Aliens), and they have a Queen who has some sort of royal-jelly-blood that can somehow make super vamp/human hybrids who can really rock a Stetson hat.

Priest is of many countless amalgams of horror and Manga. The source is a graphic novel by Min-Woo Hung, and even then, the influences of Manga and horror fragment even more. Many of the great cowboy movies (The Magnificent Seven, and other Spaghetti westerns) take their inspiration from old Samurai movies. In turn, much of modern horror has become a steam-punky smorgasbord of fancy cowboy outfits (here the fancy cowboy outfits are mixed with a priest uniform and the combo works), fancy blades, and somewhat muted martial arts fight scenes, mixed with magic and monsters. The climax is a Great Train Robbery, except with vampires and Matrix-style hand-to-hand battles.

Priest is too much ten different movies and genres and not enough its own animal. The concept – a world overtaken by monsters and religion – is solid and workable, but the director got too mixed up in iconography and iconoclasm to let that concept fly.

For those wanting a good romp with dark imagery, fighting and monsters (that don’t really resemble vampires), this is the movie for you.  Catholics and filmgoers who want something more, go elsewhere.

Sam Merlotte and his shape-shifting girlfriend have been captured by the authority; they escape by changing into flies and flit through the vents. Jason Stackhouse suddenly starts seeing his dead mother and mother, and for some reason that turns him into a vampire-killing Rambo (The show never really explained that). The spirit of the vampire god Lilith has been playing favourites with all the vampire chancellors, and making them kill each other. Alcides the werewolf takes vampire blood to power himself enough to take out the crazed local pack-master.

  And in perhaps the most offensive scene ever filmed for cable, Sheriff Andy Belfleur knocks up a fairy, who then walks into Merlotte’s bar and makes the Sheriff’s girlfriend deliver her quadruplets as she has, like, a zillion deafening birth-orgasms, as the bar’s patrons drink margaritas and make smart-aleck remarks. Just… stop, okay? 

  And the final scene (SPOILERS, obviously)

Bill, after killing Salome (yeah, that one), drinks the entire chalice of the blood of Lilith. He explodes into a shower of blood, appears to die, and then reconstitutes himself from a pool of blood and rises up. He’s covered in gore. Clearly, he’s now super badass, and Eric tells Sookie to run. When Eric looks terrified, you know it’s serious. 

My predictions:

So there’s the outline for True Blood’s next season. With Russell Edgington gone, Bill (or Billith, as you might call him) will now be the big mega bad guy of the season. By the look of things, he will not be affected by stakes, and he may have powers that allow him to be invisible and possibly incorporeal.  He may be impossible to defeat, so much of next season will be Sookie begging him to fight the demon Lilith within him (Sort of like the witch possession plot of last season, come to think of it). Andy Belfleur will be a single dad to four Fairies who will probably grow to adult size within a couple of weeks and will also probably sexually assault unsuspecting men in Bon Temps, Louisiana. Sam will also be a single dad to his girlfriend’s werewolf daughter, as his shifter girlfriend likely died from the strain of imitating Steve Newlin. And Sookie… well, Sookie will keep on causing trouble until someone does us all a favour and kills her.

Look, I show plenty of naked dudes from True Blood, so cut me some slack. Here Jessica Clark as Lilith.

This is a meet up, someplace in the middle of nowhere, of British lovers of dolls, which are somewhat lifelike and extremely expensive, anatomically accurate dolls. These men have relationships with these dolls: they give them names and have very intense conversations and domestic routines involving these dolls. I’m not sure how much sex is involved; I think it’s more a way of completely controlling a relationship. Oddly, there is one woman in this picture, and I’m not sure how the heck she got there. She doesn’t exactly look like she’s there under duress, but I’ve never heard of a female doll-lover. Not unless someone makes a lifelike Edward Cullen doll, anyway.