Prince Caspian

Ugh, it's like they sucked all the life out of the first. Since the kids know their place and role in Narnia, there's no sense of wonder. It's like they just have to figure out how to manipulate the various rules of magic and tactics of warfare in order to prevail. No sense of danger, either. The brief "temptation" scene is tepid and unthreatening. The battle scenes (probably to get in a PG rating) were pretty lame too, paling after LOTR.

One bright point, which I can confirm now that I checked on IMDB and saw that Anna Popplewell (did anyone ever have a more British name?) is 19. Stone cold hottie. I haven't seen such beautiful lips and dimples in a long time, and the glimpses of cleavage were few but all the more delectable for that.

I avoided Speed Racer after the bad reviews, but now I'm thinking I made the wrong decision.

Pwned!

Massively!

http://www.fatally-yours.com/horror-literature/book-review-orpheus-and-the-pearl-by-kim-paffenroth/

Well, you just got to keep trying. This one's so massively pwning me that I'll put it on my wall of shame to the right, lest I ever get all full of myself.

Bucket List Is One Shorter!

Woohoo! I just bought my tickets!

http://www.horrorsrollerderby.com/

Can't wait!

UPDATE: My friend Doug informs me that the cheap seats I bought are in fact the ones where the girls might actually come flying into you full tilt!! Cheap?! Hellfire, I would've paid EXTRA for THAT!!!

Interview on Horror Fiction Review

Man, I give good interviews! Wish I could channel some of that intelligence into other endeavors, but I'll take what I can get:

http://www.hfrzine.page.tl/

And thanks to Nick Cato, with whom I've locked horns on message boards, but he's always been a real sport and I appreciate it!

No Anonymous Comments

No more. I'll post most anything after I look at it, but this is my online "house" and I think if you're going to tell me how bad my writing is, or how bad my taste in music is, you can either do it on your own blog to your heart's content, or you can identify yourself if you post it here.

Intriguing to think who it might be. A Legionnaire? A random detractor? Hmmm....

Okay, got it narrowed down to eight suspects. Now it's time to go do something more useful. But it's fun trying to guess!

The Horrors Roll!

I'd heard this sport was making a comeback, but I had no idea that it was being played right up the road from me:

http://www.horrorsrollerderby.com/schedule.htm

I'd never forgive myself if I had the opportunity to witness such a spectacle of American pop culture and missed it. But I need someone to go with me. An enabler, if you will. I'll get to work on that right away.

Great Review in The Tomb

A nice little one of Orpheus and the Pearl that's very careful to avoid spoilers:

http://www.countgore.com/gore/tomb.htm

Okay, I'm actually starting to believe the hype!

But seriously, if one calculated the time spent per word, it's probably the highest for me in that story, as I went over it time and time again to get it right, so it's not surprising that it's more elegant and tight than some of my other stuff. Hard work pays.

Great Review!

Over at Mark Rainey's blog!

http://damnedrodan.livejournal.com/16184.html

Thanks! I like the heart comment; someone said one of my other stories had "brains, and not just in the sense of 'a zombie's lunch'" (or words to that effect). So I guess I'm hitting all the major organs. Paragraph 3 was very nice too, as it underlines what I was trying for.

Crows = Scary

They are. They're probably the biggest bird around here that struts around on the ground, since hawks and eagles and buzzards usually perch in trees. And man the racket. A bunch of them were going off really early this morning, like 6am, and it sounded so ominous and weird. And here's your word lesson for the day:

http://www.rinkworks.com/words/collective.shtml

While other animals get cute names for their group like "pod" or "shoal" or "gaggle," the croaking crow gets a couple very odd ones (the literary one I hadn't heard of before, but it makes sense, like they're perceived to be telling each other something mysterious).

Iron Man

Probably the best comic book movie yet. Perfect cast. Less emo-whining than Spiderman, less dark angst than Batman, less cute quips than a lot of such movies. Solid action sequences, but also the pleasures of seeing the training and building scenes that a lot of films cut as not exciting enough, but which really are a lot of fun on their own.

First Real Review!

A very enthusiastic one by Gabrielle Faust, to appear soon at http://www.fearzone.com:

BOOK REVIEW: “Orpheus and The Pearl”
By Gabrielle S. Faust

My first encounter with Kim Paffenroth’s work was early last year when I was asked to review his post-apocalyptic zombie novel Dying to Live. Up until that point, I had never been a tremendous fan of the zombie genre, or at least, so I had thought. However, I was so enthralled by the world Paffenroth painted in Dying to Live that I suddenly found myself devouring every zombie novel I could get my hands on, and all thanks to Paffenroth’s brilliant storytelling abilities and his innate ability to blend horror with philosophy. A professor of religious studies, a Bram Stoker Award Winner for his book Gospel of the Living Dead: George Romero’s Visions of Hell on Earth (Baylor, 2006) and the author of several books on the Bible and theology, Paffenroth constructs his writing with a certain elegant sophistication and literary intelligence which is often painfully absent in many modern works of literature. No matter whether he is slaying zombies in a grim and terrifying post-apocalyptic world or pondering the disturbing philosophical and spiritual ramifications of reanimation, as in Orpheus and the Pearl, Paffenroth manages to transcend the stereotypical, and often self-inflicted, boundaries of the horror genre which often restrain an author from exploring the extent of their writing abilities. Along with the pure inspiration of the tales he weaves, his range as an author is one of the many exciting aspects of his work, one that keeps you wondering just what he will come up with next.

When I first heard that Magus Press was sending me one of the limited edition copies of Orpheus and the Pearl, I was instantly intrigued by the title. Orpheus, one of the most famous figures of ancient Greek mythology, was one of the chief poets and musicians of antiquity and the inventor of the lyre. Through music and singing, it was said that he could charm wild animals and coax the very trees and rocks to dance for him. Orpheus was married to the beautiful Eurydice. One day, while fleeing from Aristaeus, the son of Apollo, Eurydice stepped into a pit of snakes and was fatally bitten. So consumed by pain of his loss, Orpheus played such sorrowful songs upon his lyre that even the hearts of Hades and Persephone were softened. Hades and Persephone gave Orpheus a chance to leave with Eurydice. The only catch was that Orpheus must walk ahead of his wife and not look back until both had arrived safely in the upper world. So full of happiness upon reaching the upper world, Orpheus turned around too soon, forgetting that they both had to be out of the Underworld, and Eurydice vanished forever.

With this Greek tragedy as a reference, I could only imagine what unique interpretation Paffenroth would sculpt for his readers. I was utterly delighted when, once again, I was swept up into a chill, gothic world, but this time in the eloquent Victorian macabre vein. In the style of Dracula or Frankenstein, Orpheus and the Pearl transports the reader instantly into a world of severe taboos and social restraints, where medicine and psychology are still, in large part, unexplored territories and the very human psyche the vault of the darkest horrors. This new tale of a doctor desperate to save the wife he has resurrected from the dead, is captivating, drawing you in and refusing to release you until the final page has been turned. Truly, I must say, Orpheus and the Pearl will go down as one of the great works of short horror fiction. Another fantastic achievement for author Kim Paffenroth.

Scream Contest

For best creative scream - one shot, no edits, 2 minutes or less, taken on a camera phone:

http://urbanchillers.com/contest/

Big money by the standards of such contests - $250 grand prize, along with runners up.

To Blurb, or not to Blurb? - A Writer's Dilemma

In the last couple months, I've gotten ever so slightly famous enough that I'm starting to be approached by fellow writers asking for blurbs for their books. I have accomodated several. With several others, I have read through the manuscript and then declined to blurb it. I'm now wondering how delicately this should be handled. I mean, I don't want to hurt anyone's feelings, and inevitably someone, somewhere down the road is going to be someone whose help I might need (i.e. writers often turn out to be editors and reviewers as well), so I don't want any hard feelings. But I do foresee two possible problems with praising everything:

I get called into the Dean's office. "I have in my hands a copy of Pedophile Cannibals in the Chipotle Jungle of Doom, Dr Paffenroth, in which a busload of children and nuns are raped and killed by rabid lamas before being pushed over a cliff into an active volcano. Can you explain why you are quoted on the back cover as saying, 'Best thing EVAH! I laughed my ass off!!'"? (There is a "moral turpitude" clause somewhere in my contract, I believe, not that I usually give it much thought.)

More generally, I want my name to be trusted. Not like George Washington or Honest Abe level of trust, but I don't want to endorse things I don't believe in, things that I wouldn't want to spend my own money on, partly because I'd fear a backlash and a reader not feeling like buying my books, if he feels I've misled him with a blurb.

Is all this too idealistic? Am I being a dick to fellow, struggling authors?

Shirley Jackson Award Finalists

The new award for horror literature is off to an auspicious start with their announcement of finalists:

2007 Shirley Jackson Awards Finalists

NOVEL

Baltimore, Mike Mignola and Christopher Golden (Bantam Spectra)
Generation Loss, Elizabeth Hand (Small Beer Press)
Sharp Teeth, Toby Barlow (William Heinemann Ltd)
The Terror, Dan Simmons (Little, Brown)
Tokyo Year Zero, David Peace (Knopf)

NOVELLA

12 Collections, Zoran Zivkovic (PS Publishing)
Illyria, Elizabeth Hand (PS Publishing)
The Mermaids, Robert Edric (PS Publishing)
"Procession of the Black Sloth," Laird Barron (The Imago Sequence and Other Stories,
Night Shade Books)
The Scalding Rooms, Conrad Williams (PS Publishing)
"Vacancy," Lucius Shepard (Subterranean #7, 2007)

NOVELETTE

"The Forest," Laird Barron (Inferno, Tor)
"The Janus Tree," Glen Hirshberg (Inferno, Tor)
"The Swing," Don Tumasonis (At Ease with the Dead, Ash-Tree Press)
"The Tenth Muse," William Browning Spencer (Subterranean #6, 2007)
"Thumbprint," Joe Hill (Postscripts #10, March 2007)

SHORT STORY

"Holiday," M. Rickert (Subterranean #7, 2007)
"The Monsters of Heaven," Nathan Ballingrud (Inferno,Tor)
"A Murder of Crows," Elizabeth Ziemska (Tin House 31, Spring 2007)
"Something in the Mermaid Way," Carrie Laben (Clarkesworld, March 2007)
"The Third Bear," Jeff VanderMeer (Clarkesworld, April 2007)
"Unique Chicken Goes in Reverse," Andy Duncan (Eclipse One, Night Shade Books)

COLLECTION

The Bone Key, Sarah Monette (Prime Books)
The Entire Predicament, Lucy Corin (Tin House)
The Imago Sequence and Other Stories, Laird Barron (Night Shade Books)
Like You'd Understand, Anyway, Jim Shepard (Knopf)
Old Devil Moon, Christopher Fowler (Serpent's Tail)

ANTHOLOGY

At Ease with the Dead, edited by Barbara and Christopher Roden (Ash-Tree Press)
Dark Delicacies 2, edited by Del Howison and Jeff Gelb (Running Press)
Inferno, edited by Ellen Datlow (Tor)
Logorrhea, edited by John Klima (Bantam Spectra)
Wizards, edited by Jack Dann and Gardner Dozois (Berkley)

New "Cool" Cover

With "Chilling" stories! (Groan...)


Seriously, it's more graphic goodness from the awesome Bob Freeman and it looks great!

My name's on there, really. Way at the bottom. Look closely!