Mark Hayes is a comedian, a DJ, a writer, and, as you can probably guess from the book’s title, he’s also an Irish guy who has found himself living in one of the most uniquely American cities around, Los Angeles. In RanDumb-er, we follow Mark as he looks at American culture with occasionally hungover eyes and an often biting (but never cruel) wit. Whether he’s dealing with a B-list celebrity who is busy predicting the end of the world, bravely trying to survive a date with a girl who insists on howling like a wildebeest, or experiencing a fake snowfall at the Grove, Hayes is never less than entertaining and sometimes even rather poignant.
He also realizes, early on, that all American girls love an Irish accent. And it’s true! Whenever I hear an Irish accent, I get all girly and giggly and one of the things that I loved about RanDumb-er is that, even though it takes place in Los Angeles, it is ultimately an Irish story. I think that the Irish have a special ability to appreciate the small absurdities of existence (and I’m not just saying that because I’m a fourth Irish myself!) and that’s what truly makes RanDumb-er stand out as a work of non-fiction comedic literature. Any writer can capture the obvious weirdness of living day-to-day. What makes Hayes so special as writer is that he picks up on the small oddities of life that we don’t always notice and he makes us consider them in a new light.
Consider the moment, early on in the book, in which Hayes has a panic attack when he realizes that he managed to accidentally leave his scissors behind in Ireland when he left for L.A. In just a few pages, Hayes manages to perfectly capture the anxiety that comes with travelling. Once you get over the initial excitement, you suddenly realize that you’re somewhere new and that you can no longer claim to be able to completely control your surroundings. It’s at moments like these that you truly realize how vulnerable you are and just how false your assumption of control is in environments both new and old. Hayes captures all of this without ever failing to make us laugh as we recognize our own individual neurosis in his story.
(I have to admit that one reason why I related to Hayes’ panic over his scissors was because, when I was in 17, I went with my family to Hawaii and it wasn’t until we were all walking along the beautiful beaches of Honolulu that I realized that I had left my St. Vitus medal back in Texas and I proceeded, under the most brilliant blue sky and surrounded by beautiful people frolicking half-undressed on the beach, to have one of the biggest panic attacks ever. Eventually, I recovered but trust me — not a day went by that I didn’t think about that medal.)
As a writer, Hayes has a very interesting and compulsively readable style, one that goes beyond the fact that he happens to be a very funny guy. Hayes writes in a stream-of-consciousness type of style and the end result is that, after a few pages, you feel that you truly are inside of his head and you are experiencing Los Angeles — and all the weirdness that goes with it — with him. If you cross James Joyce with Jack Kerouac and then add in a little Terry Southern and Tom Wolfe with a slightly less drug addled Hunter Thompson, you’ll have Mark Hayes.
Here’s the trailer for the film that will probably end up dominated my twitter timeline when it’s eventually released. I follow a lot of big Kerouac fans (and I think Big Sur is one of the great American novels) and I’ll be interested to see what they think of the long-delayed film version of On The Road. For now, I’ll just say that it’s rarely a good sign when the film version of an iconic novel is full of star cameos and I have a hard time imagining the dependably dull Garrett Hedlund as Dean Moriarty.
(Already, I can hear people complaining about the prominence of Kristen Stewart in the film’s trailer….)
My taste in entertainment tends to be on the darker, violent and existential side of things. Horror, action and sci-fi tend to perk up my attention when looking for something to read, watch and/or play. This particular guilty pleasure I came across by accident. I think most people’s guilty pleasure were discovered by accident or happenstance. I would be the first to admit that romance novels would be the last thing I would consider my type of entertainment. Not saying romance novels have no place, but it definitely doesn’t fill the criteria of what I like and listed above.
Ten or so years ago I would never have picked up these books, but I have since found them to be much to my liking. I’m still not sold on a majority of romance-themed novels, but I have been sold on the one’s written by that queen of the romance novels: Nora Roberts (and to a larger degree the one’s she writes under the pseudonym J.D Robb). The novels which sold me on her type of writing was her Three Sisters Island Trilogy.
1. Dance Upon the Air
Dance Upon the Air was a surprise find for me as a reader. My initial introduction to Nora Roberts’ writing was through a mystery-romance series of hers written by her under the pseudonym, J.D. Robb. Her In Death series had just the right balance of mystery, police procedural, humor and romance to make this male not feel all weird reading was really was a romance novel. On the prodding of a friend who is a voracious reader of all things Nora Roberts, I picked up Dance Upon the Air. From the moment I began to read the exciting introduction of the Three Sisters Island being born, I was hooked line and sinker on this book.
The Three Sisters Island is a small and quaint little island community off the coast of Massachusetts whose origins, legend has it, was due to a powerful spell weaved by three sister witches. Their spell ripped a portion of the Massachusetts coastline from the earth and floated off to just off the coast to form a sort of haven for their descendants. A haven from the puritanical witchhunts which have taken the lives of both real witches and those falsely accused as one. It’s through the later generations and their descendants that the story for this trilogy is played out through.
Dance Upon the Air deals with one of the descendants of the Three Sisters. The books tale concentrates on the trials and tribulations of one Nell Channing whose a direct descendant of the Sister whose powers were of the element of Air. A delicate woman whose life has been a living hell due to a very abusive and powerfully connected husband, Nell finally escapes her abusive relationship through guile and trickery, but as the story progresses its not long before the husband she left behind finds out the truth about his wife’s apparent “death”. Nell makes it to Three Sisters Island and upon setting foot on its soil feels as if she’s returned home. Whether by fate or providence, Nell soon meets two other women on the island whose destinies have been preordained to entwine with hers.
Dance Upon the Air sounds a bit like the Julia Roberts thriller Sleeping with the Enemy. The similarities are pretty close, but Roberts’ tale of magic, fate and self-reliance was the better of the two. Nell’s experiences as she learns to live and love again on Three Sisters Island has a sense of hope and self-reawakening which the Julia Roberts film lacked. This book shares some of the thriller aspect of the film, but doesn’t rely on it to weave a beautiful tale. Instead, Dance Upon the Air reads more like the journey of a damaged woman whose realization that the place she has now decided to call home and those friends and lovers she’s met will be the anchor in finally realizing the life she’s always thought she should have lived.
2. Heaven and Earth
Heaven and Earth marks the middle installment in Nora Roberts’ Three Sisters Island Trilogy. The first book in the series, Dance Upon the Air, started off the trilogy on a magical note with Ms. Roberts deftly combining romance, abit of the supernatural, and a nice thriller into an exciting tale of intertwined destinies and pasts, strong female characters, and passionate romance.
Heaven and Earth starts with the wedding and honeymoon of Nell Channing and Zack Todd (island town’s sheriff). This helps cement Nell’s full acceptance into the island town’s fabric. Her trials and tribulations which led her to Three Sisters Island and the test she had to pass to finally begin her life anew seem less of a coincidence and more fate and predestiny. Nell is very open to such a possibility and helps explain to her just why she felt so at home upon her arrival on the island. She thinks its the magic in her past and blood that she now has learned she has. Her new sister-in-law and fellow “sister witch” Ripley Todd thinks its all crapola and would rather not dwell on such things. Ripley Todd knows of the island’s magical history and her own role in it, but her fear and stubborn reluctance to accept her magical heritage makes up the meat of the novel.
Ripley’s attitude towards the magic that permeates the island and the two other women supposedly tied to her, Nell Channing and Mia Devlin (the resident island witch and seemingly its most desired woman on the island), run from tolerance to outright restrained hostility. Ripley’s willing to tolerate her new sister-in-law’s acceptance of her magical heritage. Mia Devlin on the other hand she avoids and ridicules in equal amount. Mia takes it all in stride but at the same time drops comments in an attempt to remind Ripley of her past and future. Ripley doesn’t like this at all and does all she can to avoid the fire-haired Mia. But soon a new factor drops into her life which would lead to her finally confronting her fear of her heritage and her role in what could be the survival of Three Sisters Island.
This factor comes in the guise of Dr. MacAllister Brooke. Mac, as he likes to be called, is a professor whose main call in life is the hunt of the so-called supernatural. His travels and research leads him to the island. He plans on researching the island and determining as to the veracity of the island’s supernatural past and origins. For some reason he and Ripley are set on a course to deal with each other. Mac sees Ripley as a challenge and an attraction forms. Ripley on the other hand sees Mac’s research and choice of profession as being something close to being worthless, but as they continue to stay in close proximity she too cannot deny the growing attraction between them.
As the story moves along, Ripley and Mac must contend not just with each other’s prickly and stubborn natures, but an outside force threatens to destroy the peaceful lives of the original Three Sisters’ descendants and the idyllic island home they and the other townspeople call home. Ripley will have to decide in the end whether to accept that which she has feared for so long, or close herself off from it forever and thus dooming her and everyone close to her. In the end, Ripley will not be alone in her own confrontation with the darkness looming over the Three Sisters Island, Mac, Nell, Mia, Zack and many others will be there to help and support her.
All in all, Heaven and Earth is a great continuation of the epic tale began with Dance Upon the Air. Ripley and Mac’s relationship is a source of both humor and heat. It’s amusing to see polar opposites, yet with so much in common personality-wise, fight tooth and nail not to give in to what is definitely two halves of the same coin finally finding each other.
3. Face the Fire
Face the Fire is the third and climactic installment to Nora Roberts’ entertaining and fun Three Sisters Island Trilogy. The first two books dealt with the first two “sisters” whose powers were tied with the elements of Air and Earth. In this third book, Mia Devlin, the third so-called sister of the title takes her power from the element of Fire. Like the element itself, Mia mirrors it in her stunning look, with her flowing fiery-red hair and even fiery demeanor. In the previous two books in the trilogy it was always Mia who guided and helped both Nell and Ripley to finding their true path in life and in finally accepting their magical heritage.
Face the Fire now has Mia becoming the center of all the magical happenings on the titular Three Sisters Island. The previous two books gradually gave its readers more and more information concerning the original Three Sisters and the prophecy/curse which befall them and which still hangs over their descendants and the island refuge their created. Nell and Ripley have done their part in trying to prevent the darkness about to descend on their island home, but its all up to Mia and her own intertwined destiny with a man who broke her heart many years past that must find a way to head off disaster and break the curse that has plagued their line through the generations. Will Mia succeed in breaking the chain of heartache which started with her ancestor? No matter what, Mia has her two “sisters” to help and assist her in her own trials.
Of the three books in the trilogy this one would lean heaviest on the supernatural aspect of the series. We learn even more of the back story of the Three Sisters Island which Mia has called home all her life and one she’s protected by herself against the evil her ancestors (also Nell’s and Ripley’s). Of all the three “sisters” who form the core of the trilogy it’s Mia who has fully embraced her heritage and her story also show’s that she is the most powerful of the three but no less damaged by a past relationship that she must acknowledge and repair if she, Nell and Ripley will succeed in preventing the age’s-old evil from returning to Three Sisters Island and finishing what it was preventing from doing so by the original three sisters.
In the end, Face the Fire is a worthy conclusion to what has been a magical trilogy. The novel continues where Dance Upon the Air and Heaven and Earth left off. It was nice to have Mia becoming the center of the story. In the previous two books she’s always been like the omnipresent powerful white witch who knew all. This time around we got to see her human side and know that she’s as damaged as her other sisters. Ms. Roberts did a great job with this trilogy and as great as the three books has been and why it continues to be a guilty pleasure of mine.
Continuing my series on the best of 2011, I now present my 10 favorite novels of the previous year. For a lot of reasons, I didn’t get to read quite as much as I wanted to over the past year. My New Year’s resolution — well, one of them — is to do better in 2012.
Without further ado, here’s my list. All 10 of the novels provided an entertaining, thought-provoking read over the past year and you should read them all.
1) The Art of Forgetting by Camille Noe Pagan
2) Swamplandia! by Karen Russell
3) Bumped by Megan McCaffrey
4) The Marriage Plot by Jeffrey Eugenides
5) There is No Year by Blake Butler
6) Girls in White Dresses by Jennifer Close
7) Skipping a Beat by Sarah Pekkanen
8) The Forgotten Waltz by Ann Enright
9) Best Kept Secret by Amy Hatvany
10) The Pale King by David Foster Wallace
Coming up tomorrow: The list we’ve all be waiting for — my top 26 films of 2011.
The vampires of The Strain appear to be the next step of the Reapers, Del Toro introduced in Blade II. These creatures far removed from the handsome angst filled vampires of True Blood, Twilight, etc and more in the line with the apex predators that caused nightmares.
Below is the breakdown of the hemophagic corpses (via the wiki page) Vampire Biology
The vector for vampirism is a capillary worm, which, once introduced into the human host’s bloodstream (either through a vampire’s feeding or direct invasion by the worm through a wound or orifice), introduces an incurable and fast-acting virus. By manipulating the host’s genes, the virus causes a human to undergo numerous radical physical changes.
Vampire Physicality
The first and most distinct vampire adaptation is the development of a long, retractile proboscis beneath the host’s tongue, which is able to extend up to six feet from the mouth. This “stinger” is both the vampire’s feeding and reproductive mechanism, shooting forth to latch onto human prey’s throat or thigh, both draining the victim’s blood for nutrition and infecting the human with capillary worms. The vampire’s jaw is set at a lower hinge than a human, the mouth gaping like a snake’s when the stinger is deployed. As the structure of the stinger is actually modified tissue from the human lungs and throat, vampires are incapable of physical speech.
A vampire’s physical appearance is governed mainly by the host body shedding those human traits that are obsolete to its new life cycle. Hair and fingernails are gradually lost, while the external nose and ears atrophy, leaving a fully matured vampire’s skin as smooth and featureless as marble. The vampire’s complexion is extremely pale between feedings, but appears a flushed red after a recent blood-meal. Eye coloration is a black pupil surrounded by a red sclera, with a white nictitating membrane sliding across for protection. The middle fingers of both hands grow and strengthen, and a thick talon develops in place of the lost fingernail. As vampire reproduction is achieved through viral infection of hosts and not through any sexual mechanism, the human genitalia also atrophy, leaving a mature vampire with no discernible gender.
The digestive and circulatory systems of a vampire are simplified and fused, the vampire’s interior organs most resembling a series of connected sacs. Nutrition from a blood feeding is transported throughout this system via a thick, viscous white fluid that forms the vampire equivalent of blood. The capillary worms are present in this fluid, swimming throughout the circulatory system and often visible beneath the vampire’s thin skin. Like rodents, a vampire is unable to vomit, its suction-based digestive process functioning only one way. All bodily waste is excreted from a single rectal orifice in the form of a pungent ammonia-based spray; a vampire will excrete for the entire duration of a feeding, purging old food as it consumes new blood.
The vampire’s body temperature runs extremely high, at 120 degrees Fahrenheit, and a human is able to feel their ambient heat from several feet away.
Many of the physical changes from human to vampire occur gradually following the initial worm infection, and are accompanied by great pain. A newly “turned” human will lie in a state of suspended animation for an entire day, rising the next night as a nascent vampire. The stinger is present for the vampire’s first foray, in order to facilitate feeding, but other traits (hairlessness, talons on the mid-digit, lack of distinct internal organs) will develop within the first seven nights following infection. The vampire’s mental state will also be confused at first, and its movements will be clumsy and awkward. As it matures, however, the vampire will become supremely agile, able to leap great distances and climb sheer surfaces with the aid of its talons. Full maturity, physically and mentally, occurs within the first thirty nights.
In spite of the vampire’s morbid biology stripping legend of most of its romance, the most famously admired trait of the undead remains intact: immortality. Unless slain by violence or sunlight, a vampire’s parasitic body structure will neither fade nor weaken with the passage of time, giving them an effectively endless “life”-span. Even in those cases where the host body is damaged beyond repair, a vampire of sufficient power can transfer their consciousness (via a torrential capillary worm transfer) from one human form to another.
Vampire Senses
The sensory apparatus of the vampire is highly adapted for their nocturnal life cycle. Color vision is replaced with the ability to sense heat signatures, and the world is perceived in a monochrome brightened by sources of warmth (such as human prey). Hearing is greatly enhanced, in spite of the loss of external ears.
The vampires’ greatest sensory asset, however, is the “hive mind” that all new vampires share with the Ancient that propagated them. Each vampire, through some undefined telepathic link, is able to send and receive thought and sensory information to and from their Ancient progenitor. In this manner, the Ancient vampires direct the actions of their individual spawn through mental communication, regardless of distance. Perhaps akin to its radiation shielding properties, the element lead has the effect of blocking this mental connection.
In spite of their biological inability to speak, vampires can communicate with humans through telepathy, transmitting thoughts directly into a person’s internal monologue. Those vampires seeking to pose as human can train themselves to move their lips in a pantomime of speech, but the actual communication is still via thought-transference.
An Ancient vampire is also able to use this telepathic ability as a weapon; known as the “murmur”, this mental shock-wave has the ability to completely overwhelm the minds of surrounding human beings, rendering them unconscious.
Vampires also experience an overwhelming compulsion to infect family members and those they cared about as humans (their “dear ones”). They possess a unique ability to locate such targets, this sense being likened to a pigeon’s homing instinct.
Vampire Weaknesses
Many of the traditional vampire “weaknesses” of common folklore remain effective, although their potency is explained in terms of specific effects on vampire biology.
Sunlight is the vampire’s ultimate destroyer, specifically ultraviolet light in the UVC range. This is due to the germicidal properties of the wavelength, as it breaks down the virus-laden tissues of the vampire’s body. A localized source of UVC light, such as a fluorescent lamp, can be used to repel a vampire, much as a burning torch can repel an animal. Complete exposure, either to direct sunlight or a powerful UVC source, will result in complete desiccation of the vampire’s body, leaving behind nothing but ashes.
Silver, whether in the form of a metal weapon or even a fine chemical mist, can also wound or kill a vampire. Much like sunlight, this is due to the disinfecting properties of the element damaging the vampire’s viral biology. While conventional weapons (lead bullets, steel blades) can cause physical damage, they will not repel a vampire. Silver causes vampires both debilitating pain and a certain amount of fear, and binding a vampire in silver will completely incapacitate them.
Severing the spinal column through any method is another effective way to destroy a vampire. While the vampire’s simplified internal organ structure makes them difficult to harm with attacks to the body, decapitation will result in the vampire’s death.
Although there appears to be no biological imperative behind it, vampires cannot cross running water. This is alluded to as having something to do with the origin of the Ancients, but no further explanation is given. This aversion to water can be overcome, however, if the vampire is assisted (or “invited”) by a human.
Traditional religious protections against vampires, such as a crucifix or holy water, display no practical effect. The prevalence of this lore is explained as having been the product of Bram Stoker’s “fevered Irish imagination”.
Garlic, another common folk defense, has no noticeable use in repelling vampires.
Silver-backed mirrors, while they will not harm a vampire, will reveal their presence. While vampires do indeed cast a reflection, it is blurred and distorted, akin to an image vibrating at an impossible speed. Modern chrome-backed mirrors, however, will not have this effect, and the vampire will appear normally in such a looking-glass.
Joe McKinney’s debut novel, Dead City, is quite an impressive piece of writing for a first-timer. It’s doubly impressive for taking the zombie tale and just making it unfold as one long nightmare with little or no prelude or wasted exposition about what led up to it. McKinney’s novel is not overlong or full of filler chapters that does nothing but try to extend the telling of the tale far longer than necessary.
Dead City is not too different from many of the zombie novels and stories that continues to see a renaissance of sorts these past couple years. McKinney takes a more novel approach in his setting by using the hurricane disasters which plagued the Gulf from Katrina and onwards. It is during the aftermath of a series of non-stop super hurricanes hitting the Texas Gulf Coast where we meet the main protagonist of this novel. Eddie Hudson is a police officer in the San Antonio Police Department who we see balancing the problems he’s having with his wife with that of the devastation left by the passing of the major hurricanes over San Antonio. The action and horror begins pretty quickly as Hudson and his partner for the night head off to a disturbance call in one of San Antonio’s neighborhoods. What they encounter at the scene is one they’ve not been trained for. Confusion and lack of relevant knowledge to combat the newly zombified citizens of San Antonio leads to disaster for Hudson and the rest of his police and emergency services brothers.
McKinney does a great job of showing the confusion and disbelief Hudson goes through as a real-life horror film comes to life in front of his very eyes. There’s the disbelief in seeing their attackers continue to move towards him and his partner with a focused determination despite being pepper sprayed at point-blank range, then hit by shotgun beanbags then to lethal gunshots to the body. It is only when shot cleanly through the head and thus destroying the brain do their crazed assailants finally stop for good. This revelation comes way too late from most of Hudson’s fellow police officers and he’s left to his own dwindling supplies of ammunition and a vow to get to his own family before the nightmare he’s seen reaches them. Along the way Hudson meets up with other survivors from undocumented workers, a high school teacher and amateur zombie researcher, to other fellow officers who have managed to survive the first few hours of the zombie outbreak.
Throughout Hudson’s attempts to get to his wife and six month-old son, more of the extent of the zombie outbreak makes itself know to Ernie and those who tags along with him as they travel the streets of a devastated San Antonio. McKinney gets high marks from this fan of the zombie genre for not shying away from describing the sort of damage these zombies can do to a human body. The gore quotient in Dead City is quite high and I think one that would satisfy any fan like myself. In fact, I will very much like to see how this novel will look like adapted into a film. The story is pretty simple and a horror road trip through a devastated city with the simple goal of a man trying to find his family amongst all the horror he has seen and still to see.
Dead City is by no means a perfect novel and at times it shows. Characters sometimes have a certain cookie-cutout feel to them. From the gung-ho and adrenaline junkie cop whose wisecracking attitude is suppose to balance out the near-desperation and panic Hudson seems to be in all the time. Then there’s the angry black man whose mistrust of the police makes him blind to the need for cooperation. Some characters seem to be there looking to become a major role in the making then quickly gone thirty pages later under the assault and tearing hands and teeth of the zombies. I think the size and length of the novel may be one reason why characterization on some of the people on the periphery got a bit shortchanged. It doesn’t bring down the overall quality of the story but it does show that this is indeed a debut novel. But with the amount of quality storytelling McKinney was able to put together I am more than confident that this writing style will improve with each successive book.
In the end, Joe McKinney’s Dead City is one roller-coaster ride of a debut horror novel which doesn’t pull its punches. The story never lets up for a moment to give our main protagonist a moment of respite from the dangers around him. Like Officer Ernie Hudson, the reader becomes bombarded with horrific images after horrific images and only until the end to we find the respite and time to relax. I hope McKinney has more tales of the undead ahead of him and that he shares it with those likeminded people who displa the same kind of interest in the black sheep of the monster genre. I very much recommend Dead City to those who enjoy a very good zombie yarn.
“[I am] a new superstition entering the unassailable fortress of forever. I am legend.” – Robert Neville
In 1954, Richard Matheson published a novel that would influence so many future generations of science-fiction and horror writers and film directors. Matheson’s body of work prior to 1954 could be summed up as good but nothing too exciting. His work thus far overlapped such pulp genres as horror, science-fiction and fantasy. This style would be the hallmark of his brand of story-telling. It would be in his novel I Am Legend that his unique style of combining different genres that Matheson would have his greatest and most epic work to date.
I Am Legend takes the vampire tale and brings it out of the shadows and darkness, so to speak. Set in the late 1970’s, I Am Legend begins its tale with humanity pretty much on the quick path to extinction due to a pandemic where the bacterium or virus involved caused symptoms very similar to what folklore had called vampirism. The protagonist of this tale was one Robert Neville. An unassuming man living in a Los Angeles suburban neighborhood who might just be the only living human being, or at least the only un-infected one, on the face of the planet. Neville’s been reduced to a day-to-day routine of defending his fortified home from the vampire-like infected humans who’ve tried attacking him and his home once night falls. This routine has become so ingrained in Neville that it starts him on a downward spiral to utter despair. He knows that he might just be the only human left and the prospect of such an idea almost becomes too much for his psyche. It’s this growing despair which gradually causes Neville to make little mistakes in his routine that puts him in greater levels of danger from those turned who see him as nothing but cattle.
His attempts to solve the mystery of why he’s the only one not affected by the disease becomes his way of keeping himself sane. Neville’s work in trying to find the answer leads him to take chances in keeping a vampire survivor alive and bound instead of just killing it outright. His experiments ranges from disproving the myths surrounding the vampire creature and acknowledging the scientific and/or psychological explanations to certain behavioral traits of these nocturnal creatures.
Neville’s studies on captured vampires tell him why certain things like garlic and sunlight causes such an extreme reaction on these creatures. Why do they have a certain invulnerability towards bullets but not a stake through the heart is one question he tries to answer through his research. He even surmises that the vampires aversion to crucifix was more psychological than anything supernatural. Neville arrives at this after observing a vampire’s reaction to a Star of David was similar to the reaction of another one towards the crucifix.
It’s events such as these which puts I Am Legend in a category all by itself. It still uses themes of horror which the vampires fulfill to great effect, but it also does a great job of taking the vampire tale out of the supernatural realm and into the scientific and logical. Neville’s attempts to keep himself sane, as his loneliness begin to weigh on his psyche and health, through these studies and experiments adds a level of the science-fiction to this tale. It’s the combination of these two genres which makes I Am Legend such an epic tale in scope yet it’s not that which gives the tale its heaviest impact. It’s Neville himself, more to the point, his desperate situation of being the last man on earth weighing on his mind. This tone gives this apocalyptic vampire tale such an intimate feel that the reader hopes and wishes for some sort of peaceful end to Neville; better yet, some hope that he might find clues that he might not be the last.
As the story moves forward, the line between who is human, who is monster and who is the true survivor become blurred as Neville’s forays into the city for supplies lead him to a community of others who have not succumbed to the monstrous effect of the pandemic. It’s this discovery that gives Neville a semblance of hope which momentarily lifts the heavy weight of inevitability from his mind. But not everything is at it seems at first glance. Neville finds this out as his encounters with this thriving community continue to give him more and more insight as to how they’ve survived. The climactic end to this tale has become such a classic ending that any other resolution wouldn’t have worked. The end worked as the best possible ending to Matheson’s tale. It also gives the books title a deeper and more profound meaning to it.
I Am Legend will continue to go down in literary history as one of the best examples of fantastic literature. It’s seemless blending of horror, science-fiction and the apocalyptic gives the tale both an epic and intimate feel and tone. It’s not wonder the very themes and premise of this story has influenced such horror writers and filmmakers as Stephen King (The Stand, Salem’s Lot) and George A. Romero (Night of the Living Dead, Dawn of the Dead, Day of the Dead). I Am Legend takes the vampire tale out of the shadows and darkness it usually in habits and brings it out to the light of science and logic with surprising results. A true classic piece of writing from Richard Matheson and one that still stands as the benchmark for apocalyptic tales.
Today is the 80th birthday of the legendary Texas-born actor Rip Torn. Let’s celebrate the man and the myth by watching him beat up Norman Mailer in the 1970 film Maidstone.
(Maidstone, by the way, is only available on a Region 2, French DVD so clicking on the link will only take you to a page where you can order a paperback copy of the script. And the script, to be honest, isn’t that great of a read. Sorry.)
Here’s a little background. Maidstone was the third film to be “directed” by writer Norman Mailer. Like his previous films (and the Beatles Magical Mystery Tour), the idea was to get a bunch of odd people all together in one location, give them a loosely structured plot, and then allow them to just improvise. The plot, in this case, was that Mailer was a famous film director who was also running for President and Torn was his brother who has been paid money to assassinate him.
According to the Peter Manso’s Mailer: His Life and Times, the entire shoot was a disorganized mess. Torn, quickly, grew frustrated with Mailer as both a director and a human being. The final straw apparently came when Torn saw Mailer using the film’s cameras to make a home movie of him playing with his children.
So, Torn walked up to Mailer, announced that he was going to kill him, and bashed him on the head with a hammer. Mailer responded by biting off a piece of Torn’s ear.
Maybe it’s just the white trash country girl in me, but I always get a sneaky little thrill out of watching men actually fight for real. However, that said, it’s not just the brawl that makes this a classic clip. It’s the conversation between Mailer and Torn afterward. Rip Torn’s just a badass and here’s wishing him a happy 80th birthday!
Sometimes, believe it or not, I feel very insecure when I come on here to talk about movies because, unlike most of my fellow writers and the site’s readers, I’m actually pretty new to the world of pop culture and cult films. Up until 8 years ago, ballet was my only obsession. It was only after I lost that dream that I came to realize that I could feel that same passion for other subjects like history and writing and movies. In those 8 years, I think I’ve done a fairly good job educating myself but there’s still quite a bit that I don’t know and, at times, I’m almost overwhelmed by all the movies that I’ve read so much about but have yet to actually see. And don’t even get me started on anime because, honestly, my ignorance would simply astound you. What I know about anime — beyond Hello Kitty — is pretty much limited to what I’ve read and seen on this site. (I do know what a yandere is, however. Mostly because Arleigh explained it to me on twitter. I still don’t quite understand why my friend Mori kept using that as her own personal nickname for me back during my sophomore year of college but that’s a whole other story…)
The reason I started soul searching here is because I’m about to review a book — The Eurospy Guide by Matt Blake and David Deal — that came out in 2004 and I’m about to review it as if it came out yesterday. For all I know, everyone reading this already has a copy of The Eurospy Guide in their personal collection. You’ve probably already spent 6 years thumbing through this book and reading informative, lively reviews of obscure movies. You may already know what I’ve just discovered. Well, so be it. My education is a work in progress and The Eurospy Guide has become one of my favorite textbooks.
The Eurospy Guide is an overview of a unique genre of films that started in the mid-60s and ended with the decade. These were low-budget rip-offs — the majority of which were made in Italy, Germany, and France — of the Sean Connery-era James Bond films. These were films with titles like Code Name: Jaguar, Secret Agent Super Dragon, More Deadly Than The Male, and Death In a Red Jaguar. For the most part, they starred actors like George Nader, Richard Harrison, and Eddie Constantine who had found the stardom in exploitation cinema that the mainstream had never been willing to give to them. They featured beautiful and underappreciated actresses like Marilu Tolo and Erika Blac and exotic, over-the-top villainy from the likes of Klaus Kinski and Adolfo Celi. Many of these films — especially the Italian ones — were directed by the same men who would later make a name for themselves during the cannibal and zombie boom of the early 80s. Jess Franco did a few (but what genre hasn’t Jess Franco experimented with) and even Lucio Fulci dabbled in the genre. Their stories were frequently incoherent and, just as frequently, that brought them an undeniably surreal charm.
And then again, some of them were just films like Operation Kid Brother, starring Sean Connery’s younger brother, Neil. (Operation Kid Brother was an Italian film, naturally.)
Well, all of the films — from the good to the bad (and no, I’m not going to add the ugly) — are covered and thoroughly reviewed in The Eurospy Guide. Blake and Deal obviously not only love these films but they prove themselves to be grindhouse aficionados after my own heart. Regardless of whether they’re reviewing the sublime or the ludicrous, they approach each film with the same enthusiasm for the potential of pure cinema run amuck. It’s rare to find reviewers who are willing to pay the same respect to a film like The Devil’s Man that they would give to a sanctioned classic like The Deadly Affair.
Along with reviewing a countless number of films, Deal and Blake also include two great appendices in which they detail the review some of the film franchises that came out of the genre and provide biographies of some of the more prominent stars of the eurospy films.
The highest compliment I can pay to The Eurospy Guide is that, even with all the various films guides I own (and I own a lot), I found films reviewed and considered in this book that I haven’t found anywhere else. Everytime I open this book, I learn something that, at least to me, is new. The book was an obvious labor of love for Blake and Deal and I love the results of their labor.
Four years ago, I was in Recycle Books in Denton, Texas and I came across a book called something like “Unknown Legends of Rock and Roll.” The book came with a CD that featured music by some of the bands featured in that book. The first song on that CD (and my personal favorite) was Smashed Blocked, a song from a band called John’s Children.
Through the Shattered Lens 