First things first: I’ve posted links to all my reviews of the stories in Clive Barker’s Books of Blood in one handy spot. Click and (hopefully) enjoy.
Next, Black Hole, Charles Burns’s horror-comic masterpiece, is out, and there are reviews and profiles here there and everywhere. Courtesy of Tom Spurgeon comes this Philadelphia Inquirer profile of Burns and his work (registration required; try username 123@counting.com and password 123ABC), in which Art Spiegelman brings the yuks:
“He’s not at all the kind of guy who’s walking around saying: ‘I can’t wait to cut somebody’s throat,’ ” says Art Spiegelman, creator of the Pulitzer Prize-winning comic Maus. “But the times we’ve stayed over his house, I’ve made sure to double-bolt the door.”
Next, courtesy of comics critic Paul Gravett’s new website comes this overview of Burns’s work, with particular emphasis on body horror and (naturally) Black Hole.
And courtesy of I don’t know who comes this mildly critical New York Press review of Black Hole, which astutely compares it to Dan Clowes’s also excellent, if far more impenetrable, study of sexualized horror, Like a Velvet Glove Cast in Iron.
This book is the real deal, fright fans.
Speaking of neat books, I liked the sound of The 13 Best Horror Stories of All Time (reviewed by Rod Lott at Bookgasm). If you’ve ever thought it’d be cool to have “The Tell-Tale Heart,” “The Call of Cthulu,” “The Monkey’s Paw,” “The Great God Pan,” “The Lottery,” “Dracula’s Guest” and so forth all collected in one place, it sounds like you could do a lot worse than to buy this anthology.
On the “old news” beat, All Too Flat maestro Ken Bromberg sends word of a zombie attack on the American Idol auditions at UT Austin this past August. I watch American Idol regularly so I will not indulge in the metaphorical Idol-fan bashing that could be done here; I leave that to you the reader.
Moving to the movies, Bill Sherman takes a look at David Cronenberg’s The Brood; among other things, he points out the thematic links between Cronenberg’s work and Clive Barker’s. He’s a man after my own heart.
Also at the movies, Carl Swift at The Black Lagoon examines The Blair Witch Project. I’ve noticed that this movie–the scariest film I’ve ever seen, incidentally–seems to be undergoing a well-deserved and long-overdue critical rehabilitation of late, which is a very very good thing indeed for lovers of great horror; it’s far too important a film to be relegated to insignificance. (For example, more than almost any other film, it prepped American imaginations for the J-horror movement, I think.)
Finally, fantasy smackdown! Philip Pullman of His Dark Materials fame has taken aim at C.S. Lewis’s beloved Narnia series (in the Observer, as quoted by the BBC, courtesy of CinemaEye, courtesy of Bookgasm–phew!) on the eve of the live-action film version of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, calling them “a peevish blend of racist, misogynistic and reactionary prejudice.” I don’t really get the racist angle–isn’t that canard usually reserved for Tolkien?–and I’ve never read Pullman so I don’t have much of a dog in this race, but I must admit I’m far a big fan of Lewis’s fantasy series. This may be because I first read it as a lapsarian grown-up rather than a kid with all the devoutness that childhood usually entails, but I think, regardless, that a) it would always have paled in comparison to Tolkien’s work and my love thereof; b) its attempts to shoehorn its entire plot and world into Christian allegory leads to hamfisted and unforgivable storytelling lapses, most notably the fate of Susan in The Last Battle. Feh. And on a semi-related note, I don’t really remember the huge epic battle sequences that the filmmakers seem to have discovered in TLtWatW if the trailers are any indication, do you? Hmm, I wonder if they may have drawn inspiration from any other recent successful fantasy films…