This week’s Horror Roundtable is about horror stuff we’ve forgotten the names of but remember enjoying. Mine are all books from my youth, and by the look of it ol’ Horror Blog Steven has at least one of the answers I seek.

I had so many of these forgotten horror touchstones on my mind that I didn’t even bother talking about the unbelievably awesome classic-monsters activity book I had, but I wish I could track down a copy of that thing too. There was one activity where you had to match the monster to its weakness. It was SO RAD. I feel like I did every activity twelve times, or maybe I just studied them once I completed them.

Related: This “Science Over the Edge” page at a site called The Un-Museum that I came across just so happens to contain information on two of my young self’s favorite scary “true” stories: the disappearance of David Lang (from a book whose title I can’t remember, which I mention in the roundtable) and the Berkeley Square Horror (from Daniel J. Cohen’s The World’s Most Famous Ghosts). The best thing about the latter was that it combined the usual apparition and poltergeist stuff with the possibility of some sort of monster/demon thing, that I think might have come up from the sewers, and had the awesome tagline that anyone who spent the night in the haunted room either died or went mad. Try to imagine how awesome that would sound to a second-grader.

Read: Song of Susannah–“2nd Stanza: The Persistence of Magic”; “3rd Stanza: Trudy and Mia”; “4th Stanza: Susannah’s Dogan”; “5th Stanza: The Turtle”

Three recurring elements of King’s Dark Tower storytelling technique appear in these chapters:

1) His seeming inability to differentiate the wheat from the chaff. In Chapter Two, there’s page after page describing magical pendulums plumb lines and shit. In a world with giant cyborg bears, who cares?

2) Random characters who get introduced, seem like they’ll be come important supporting cast members, then disappear. This harkens all the way back to The Drawing of the Three, with Eddie’s stewardess and Odetta’s driver and the cops who try to stop Roland/Jack Mort. This time around this poor Trudy woman even gets her name in a chapter heading, but as far as I can tell that’s the last we’ll see of her.

3) Using the promise of answers to drag the reader (well, me at least) through stuff I don’t give a damn about. I still don’t care whether Susannah lives or dies and wish the other gunslingers would just leave her for dead and get on with it. (I feel the same about Eddie, and Father Callahan has gotten pretty irritating pretty quickly, too. Jake and Oy are pretty cool, though. God, how much better would this series be if it were just Roland, Jake, and Oy, a sort of Lone Wolf and Cub and Cub deal?) However, I’ll put up with her if Mia really is gonna spill the beans to her about her demon baby and whatever the hell else is going on.

I’ve also picked up on a couple SPOILERS, somewhat inadvertently and somewhat not.

1) Thanks to that Dark Tower comic that Marvel put out that I was flipping through yesterday, I know what the Crimson King looks like. Familiar, is how I’d put it.

2) I also know that there’s a big cameo on the way in this book, thanks to the back-jacket copy. Argh, is how I’d put it.

I haven’t watched a lot of TV this fall, aside from Dr. Phil and Judge Judy, that is*, because with The Sopranos done and Lost and Battlestar Galactica not returning until mid-winter at the earliest, we went from having three of my four all-time favorite dramas** on the air to zero and it knocked the wind out of my sails. Because I love them so, I’ve been very curious as to the impact the WGA strike would have on Lost and BSG‘s already convoluted scheduling. A pair of interviews with the shows’ striking creators tell the tale, and in the process shed light on the absurd and rapacious behavior of the networks and studios that led things to this sorry pass.

First up is Ronald D. Moore of Battlestar Galactica, interviewed at IGN. He says that they will have the first 10 episodes of Season Four available to air, which brings things up to the mid-season cliffhanger, and then nothin’. This isn’t that big of a change from the pre-strike status quo, considering how SciFi Channel was dickering with the notion of splitting the season in half and not showing part two until 2009 anyway, but it forces that particular hand. Moore also has one of the most illuminating examples of the kind of shenanigans the writers are up against:

“I had a situation last year on Battlestar Galactica where we were asked by Universal to do webisodes [Note: Moore is referring to The Resistance webisodes which ran before Season 3 premiered], which at that point were very new and ‘Oooh, webisodes! What does that mean?’ It was all very new stuff. And it was very eye opening, because the studio’s position was ‘Oh, we’re not going to pay anybody to do this. You have to do this, because you work on the show. And we’re not going to pay you to write it. We’re not going to pay the director, and we’re not going to pay the actors.’ At which point we said ‘No thanks, we won’t do it.’ We got in this long, protracted thing and eventually they agreed to pay everybody involved. But then, as we got deeper into it, they said ‘But we’re not going to put any credits on it. You’re not going to be credited for this work. And we can use it later, in any fashion that we want.’ At which point I said ‘Well, then we’re done and I’m not going to deliver the webisodes to you.’ And they came and they took them out of the editing room anyway — which they have every right to do. They own the material — But it was that experience that really showed me that that’s what this is all about. If there’s not an agreement with the studios about the internet, that specifically says ‘This is covered material, you have to pay us a formula – whatever that formula turns out to be – for use of the material and how it’s all done,’ the studios will simply rape and pillage.”

That’s pretty astounding to me. Moore goes on to viciously insult the networks’ argument about not knowing how to make money online. Read it. (Via Jason Adams.)

Next is Lost‘s Damon Lindelof, interviewed at E!. Points of interest:

1) Eight episodes for Season 4 have been filmed so far and they will start airing in February as planned.

2) The eighth episode is a major cliffhanger.

3) If the strike continues long enough for the remaining eight episodes of Season 4 not to air this year, it screws up their plans for the final three 16-episode seasons considerably.

In related news, a series of Lost webisodes are slated to debut on Monday–a year or so later than they were supposed to, of course, because of the very issues the writers are on strike over. (Via The Lost Blog.)

*Totally not kidding.

**Twin Peaks.

It’s hard to tell what little kids will make of Fred Claus, but it’s not as if they haven’t been primed for it. By now, the Shrek movies and other Pixar/Dreamworks/Disney animations have taught them that fairy tales are to be mocked and deconstructed, not believed or adored. Reimagined today, Bambi and Dumbo would be plagued with work-related stress, acid reflux and sleep apnea.

–Steven Boone, Fred Claus: The problem isn’t Santa’s brother,” Newark Star Ledger

(Via Matt Zoller Seitz)

Read: Song of Susannah–“1st Stanza: Beamquake”

When you realize the book you’re reading is going to be about a frantic search to find the title character before the demon baby she’s carrying pops out and eats her and your first thought is “good riddance,” that’s probably a bad sign, right?

Oh.

My.

Fucking.

God.

(Found here. Via Matt Maxwell.)

Here at the A&F Quarterly we’re big fans of Seattle-based artist Bill Brown. He’s one of our go-to illustrators. Here’s why.

His line practically looks like it’s puffing away at a pipe while wearing a smoking jacket, and man does he know his way around the color wheel.

You can see more of his work at his website, and at his page at Art Department.

Read: Wolves of the Calla–“The Meeting of the Folken“; “Before the Storm”; “The Wolves”; “Epilogue: The Doorway Cave”; Author’s Note; Author’s Afterword

It’s Duck Amuck???

Oh brother.

You know, I had a feeling. I’d put it aside because King’s gotten cute about this sort of thing before; in Misery, for example, the events of The Shining and the career of horror author Stephen King are both referenced as real things. Eddie said what he said about feeling like they were in a storybook or fairy tale, and King made sure we noticed “Stephen King” listed as one of the items on The Manhattan Restaurant of the Mind’s strangely changed “menu,” but I didn’t think that was really where we were going. Now that apparently it is, I really don’t know what to say except that this idea is not interesting to me. Like, at all. Sheesh, what would Sergio Leone say?

Ultimately it strikes me as another idea King couldn’t stop himself from spackling atop all the other ideas he has for this series, like weapons based on lightsabers and Doombots and the golden sneetch from Harry Potter. (Which also explains that hideous chapter-heading font he’s using here.) Those were kinda fun, and also kinda plausible based on what we know about the robots developed by North Central Positronics and LaMerk Industries, all of which seem designed to be superficially appealing to children in some way. Making the whole thing meta, though, is just–I dunno what it is. An apology for using genre tropes so head-on? Doubtful. Apologetics for genre aren’t King’s style. I’m going to go with “a misguided attempt to explore ‘the dark magic of storytelling'” or something like that.

Ah well. The fight was pretty cool, though over just as quickly as Roland thought it would be and without the major complicating problem you thought was coming (and maybe should have come, predictable though it may have been), a la the death of Susan in Wizard and Glass. I was impressed by the Slightman headfake, how we were lead to believe the major problem for Jake would be how his friend Ben Jr. would look at him once his dad was outed as a traitor, never once suspecting that Ben Jr. wouldn’t be alive to look at him at all. And now we’ve got a new name to add to the big-bad list: Finli o’ Tego, maybe a bird-headed taheen, maybe another Flagg alias.

I think the most instructive part of this concluding chunk was the bit just prior to the battle, where Roland muses that there’s probably only 15-30 second before the blood-madness of battle descends upon his mind but until then he can see all things in his mind’s eye real clearly–and then King spends a full page detailing every thing he could see. It reminded me of the part in Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure where Jan Hooks’ Alamo tour guide says “there are thousands and thousands of uses for corn, all of which I’m going to tell you about right now!” That’s The Dark Tower in a nutshell.

Most people who know me personally know that I spend a lot of time hanging around a Tori Amos messageboard. (It’s really more like a messageboard for people who met through being fans of Tori Amos, especially if you ask them, but that’s hard to explain.) Many of these folks are kind of not so crazy about Tori’s last few albums. The most recent, American Doll Posse, saw her create and adopt four separate personae–political Isabel, lusty Santa, angry Pip, and earthy-airy Clyde–between whom she alternates from concert to concert, performing certain songs only as particular “Doll” and apparently treating the whole thing like an extensive method-acting project cum David Bowie/Ziggy Stardust routine.

The thing about Tori, though, is that many of her fans, particularly among the ardent ones of the sort who’d meet while following her concert tours around the country, got into her because of how she’s spoken and sung about her own very real experience with rape. She did this most directly and most famously in a song called “Me and a Gun,” a harrowing and uncomfortable a cappella number from her solo debut Little Earthquakes.

Anyway, in news that astonishingly could actually be seen as horror-related, last night she came out as “Pip” and at some point cranked up the band, started singing “Me and a Gun,” and then did this:

At different points during the song, Tori/Pip rubbed herself with the knife, used it to simulate having a penis, held the gun to her head, and pointed it at the audience.

The whole situation has some fans (mostly people who were out of love with her already) in an uproar. They feel the whole thing reeks of schtick, that it’s shock rock, that doing it as a character invalidates the original song and makes a joke out of this interpretation. The fans who were at the show sound generally much more favorable, calling it one of the most intense performances they’ve ever seen.

The thing that sticks out at me is the notion that performing in character adversely affects the emotional or artistic or aesthetic truth of the performance. Even if you put aside the fact that “Tori Amos” is a character created by Myra Ellen Amos, there’s obviously a long and incredibly rich history of artists (of all stripes) adopting pseudonyms, re-christening themselves, even creating whole new identities to inhabit to get their points across. You’ll never convince a David Bowie fan like me that “Moonage Daydream” would have been better or truer or realer live had a young man named David Jones taken the stage rather than an eyebrowless freak called Ziggy Stardust, and just earnestly sung the song rather than dropping to his knees and pretending to blow Mick Ronson.

When Paul Karasik was drawing his contribution to my David Bowie sketchbook (much to his own chagrin), he and Gary Groth asked me what it was I liked about Bowie. I was tongue-tied and my explanation came out garbled, but the gist was that I spent most of high school and college fixated on defining myself. The movies I watched, the clothes I wore, the books I read, the bands I listened to (and almost more importantly, the bands I wouldn’t be caught dead listening to) were all carefully calibrated to add up to The Eternal Sean. That’s not to say that my enjoyment of any of it was a pose, because it wasn’t; the pose came in the constant pressure to adhere to my own standards, which once set could never be broken. Suddenly, along comes Bowie, picking up influences wherever one catches his eye, incorporating or even inhabiting them for as long as they move him, then moving along to the next thing without batting an eye. How enormously liberating! I’ll never be able to overstate that. Change your mind? Like something you didn’t used to, or aren’t supposed to? Who cares!

The Who, now that you mention it, are the reason I wrote this post. I’m watching this documentary about them called Amazing Journey that I TiVo’d off of VH1 Classic, and there’s this part where they talk about how this publicist named Pete Meaden saw the enormous potential of linking the band to the burgeoning Mod culture. As Roger Daltrey puts it, “He said, ‘Right–get out there, cut your hair, go down to Carnaby Street, try on all the clever gear,’ and all of a sudden we were a Mod band.” No handwringing about whether tailored suits and Union Jacks meant Roger Daltrey didn’t have the balls to really be himself, no gnashing of teeth about theatrics and image–just bam, okay, hey, this works! And listen to “I Can’t Explain” and tell me it didn’t.

(Photos found here)

That’s more or less how a school-shooting rampage that left eight dead in Finland is being portrayed by the news media, because the killer posted videos on YouTube implying that the rampage was in the offing. For example, This CNN story on the killings was once headlined “Finland school shooting linked to YouTube” on CNN.com’s front page. This is Bryan Alexander territory, I know, but you never saw headlines like “Columbine school shooting linked to pen and paper” because Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold kept diaries.

Speaking of Harris and Klebold, the Finnish murderer, Pekka Eric Auvinen, shared their affinity for German industrial act KMFDM. This is a trait that all three shared with me (or at least me in high school and college), so I think it’s equally meaningless.

All told it’s a story rife with elements that make for sensationalistic, Robert Downey Jr. in Natural Born Killers-style reporting, right down his pose and T-shirt in the photo above.

(Video still by STF/AFP/Getty Images, via Andrew Sullivan)

Waterboarding is something of which every American should be proud.

–Deroy Murdock, “Waterboarding Has Its Benefits,” National Review Online

(Via Andrew Sullivan)

As a teaser for a promised upcoming whopper of an interview, Bloody Disgusting has posted a few quotes from Clive Barker regarding the varied status of several film projects–the Hellraiser remake, the Nightbreed director’s cut, the Tortured Souls collaboration with Todd McFarlane, and the Masters of Horror/Fear Itself network transition. Check it out.

Read: Wolves of the Calla–“Secrets”; “The Dogan, Part 1”; “The Dogan, Part 2”; “The Pied Piper”

As we head toward the big showdown, we’re on an upward trend. The ka-tet finally shares its many secrets, putting an end to one of the most frustrating aspects of the book so far. Jake has one of those cloak-and-dagger lions’-den espionage expeditions that King excels at. In the process he discovers the moles among the Calla–Andy the Robot and Slightman the Elder, as suspected–and uncovers Andy as yet another piece of ancient technology gone sociopathic, like Blaine and Shardik. Computers, robots, and other machinery outliving their creators by milennia and going bad in the process is one of the eeriest and most interesting aspects of the Dark Tower mythos and it’s always fun to see another example pop up.

Meanwhile, as irritated as I am by King’s mafia-by-numbers hoodlums back in New York, and as silly as I find the idea he advances via Eddie that such men marry and breed creatures just as evil as they are (seems to me they’re more likely to be self-involved morons like A.J. Soprano or Victoria Gotti’s brood), watching Eddie get medieval on the asses of Balazar’s enforcers was the most fun I’ve had with this character ever. Of course King has to go and ruin it by forcing Eddie to explain whether or not he was bluffing about killing the goons’ families if they messed with Calvin Tower again, but at least the answer is never “yep.”

King’s refusal to divulge what’s behind the Wolves’ masks gets more obnoxious each time he makes a point of telling us the heroes know something we don’t, but it seems pretty clear by now (especially when Jake muses that their footprints will be heavy like Andy’s) that they’re mass-produced robots or cyborgs. (Now that I think of it, one of Berni Wrightson’s dopey, no-attention-to-detail illustrations kind of blew that surprise earlier, but only if you trusted his visual imagination as truth, which I didn’t considering he couldn’t even get the much-ballyhooed haircolor of the redheaded woman killing the Wolf in that scene right.) I guess we’ll find out soon enough.

Passing thought: The Tick-Tock Man didn’t really amount to much, did he? His prominent role during the big Flagg reveal at the end of The Waste Lands made him seem like he’d play a major part in the subsequent volume or volumes, but he gets iced almost instantly by the ka-tet as he works he controls during Flagg’s Oz routine. Maybe Ben Slightman the Younger will become Jake’s new archnemesis?

Slate’s Chris Suellentrop reviews Super Mario Bros.: The Lost Levels. It’s the original Japanese Super Mario Bros. 2 whose difficulty and, well, gamer sadism (the mushrooms are poisonous! the warp zones lead you backwards!) led Nintendo to shelve it in the States in favor of the weird sequel we know over here; it’s finally getting its North American debut on Wii.

I’ve been thinking about Super Mario a lot lately, maybe as I continue to try to wrap my head around how fresh and innovative the Scott Pilgrim series’ use of video-game style and structure feels. The other weekend I pointed out to my bemused family just how weird the video games we took in stride in our youth really are. After all, Super Mario Bros. is about an Italian plumber and his brother who battle evil mushrooms and turtles in order to rescue a princess from a dragon/turtle/dinosaur thing, and in the process use stars to become invincible, flowers to breathe fire, and raccoon ears and tails to fly. That’s freaking bizarre, and yet my entire generation treats it all like common sense. These are hardly the most original observations, I know, and I’ve actually never been that much of a gamer so I’m barely equipped to address this stuff at all, but it just seems to me like this is an unbelievably rich vein to mine, at least as fruitful as some of the all-time great weird ideas like “rich orphan dresses up as bat to fight crime” and “invincible alien has ugly stupid backwards-speaking clone.”

Read: Wolves of the Calla–“Took’s Store; The Unfound Door”; “The Priest’s Tale Concluded (Unfound)”

After a bit of thrilling ordering-stuff-in-a-general-store action and another interdimensional warp zone, we come to the conclusion of Father Callahan’s story. Again I’m struck by how well his would have stood on its own, and probably would have but for King’s post-car-accident Dark Tower mania. I’m also struck by how tightly my interest in reading these books is tied to treating them as Marvel Handbooks–finding out the connection between the vampires and the low men and the Big Coffin Hunters and Flagg and Sayre and the Crimson King and so on without caring so much as to how that information is presented. Speaking of, this section really seems to be the first where my failure to have read any King books more recent than The Dark Half is an impediment to picking up all or even most of the references he’s making to his books’ shared world. I’ll live, but it’s quite clear that the Dark Tower series are King books for King fans.

PS: Jake really should have told Roland and the gang about Andy the robot’s late-night rendezvous with Slightman Sr. Why wouldn’t he?

It takes a few moments to notice the dent in Sgt. Dan Powers’ head, a place where he was stabbed with a nine-inch blade while patrolling the streets of the Iraqi capital.

–Jennifer Pifer, “Soldier survives bizarre injury thanks to heroics and a bit of tech,” CNN.com

Lakshmi Tatma was born joined to a ‘parasitic twin’ and will go under the knife at the hands of 30 surgeons to remove two of her useless arms and legs.

—“Toddler with eight limbs branded ‘reincarnation of Hindu god’ to undergo life-saving operation,” ThisIsLondon.co.uk

Like Jon Hastings before him, Steven Wintle at The Horror Blog gets on my illustrated favorite horror movies list tip–only he presents his as a quiz. Fun for the whole family!

Well, I know that the apocalyptic imagination is usually a lack of imagination; it refuses to face the dull prose of suffering, refuses to understand just how bad things can get without history coming to an end. Empires can limp on for centuries.

—Atem at Metameat

Referring to apocalyptic worldviews, not apocalyptic fiction, of course.

(Via Kevin Huizenga.)

I’ve been around the block a few times when it comes to scary stuff, so I’d like to think it’d really take some doing to come up with a Halloween costume that would genuinely give me the creeps. Kudos, then, to this young lady. This is seriously impressive.

Found here and here, via Blue States Lose.

Read: Wolves of the Calla–“Gran-Pere’s Tale”; “Nocturne, Hunger”

Again I question the wisdom of presenting so much important information through people sitting around and talking about it decades after the fact. Kinda leeches some of the excitement from the proceedings, no? But what’s worse is how this technique makes the big cheat in this section–King keeping Gran-Pere’s revelation to Eddie of what lies beneath the Wolves’ masks a secret from the reader–seem like an even bigger cop-out than it already is. To have so much vital plot development come out in this way, only to hide the most vital development of all from we the readers, simply makes it crystal clear that this is a decision made by an extradigetic author for no other purpose than to wring more drama out of the proceedings than he otherwise could. It’s almost insulting. It makes me hope that Jake is right an the ka-tet is falling apart, so that maybe we can clear the deck of these losers and get back to basics. Or maybe just out of spite.