I had to do some kind of October horrorblogging special, right?

That’s what I was asking myself a few days ago, without realizing that no, I didn’t, since I really don’t do a big October blogathon every year. My big Clive Barker Books of Blood review rampage was back in 2005, and my initial 31-day foray into horrorblogging happened in 2003. I guess I take even years off, sort of like how the Star Trek movies take the even-numbered installments off from sucking.

But I couldn’t really think of anything to tackle, until I was about a third of the way into The Stand and realized that I wanted to read more about this Randall Flagg character. Hmm, Flagg’s the villain in those Dark Tower books, right? And I still haven’t gotten around to reading them ever…why don’t I dig up those copies of the first few volumes that I got for Christmas a few years ago and read them all month long, and blog about it while I’m at it?

So that’s what I’ll be doing to celebrate the scariest month of the year this year. But things will be different from past years’ ambitious blog projects. Even though the Dark Tower series is ostensibly Stephen King’s magnum opus, my blogging thereof will stay true to the humble roots of my idea to do so. Don’t hold me to this or anything, because it’s a woman’s prerogative to change her mind, but I’ll probably be keeping things short, sweet, and informal, more logging my reactions than offering analysis. I learned from my abortive attempt to blog The Lord of the Rings that the second the writing gets in the way of the reading, it’s no fun anymore.

Before we get started, I want to list the things I knew, or thought that I knew, about The Dark Tower before cracking open its first volume, The Gunslinger.

1) It’s about a gunslinger named Roland. He’s on some kind of quest for a big important building called the Dark Tower. These ideas were lifted from the Childe Roland folk tales of old. It’s a dark fantasy epic.

2) The main bad guy is Randall Flagg, who in other incarnations is also the main bad guy of The Stand and Eyes of the Dragon. He’s also known here as the man in black.

3) In the books, the Tower is some sort of interdimensional vortex.

4) The gunslinger was trained in some sort of vaguely aristocratic ritualized way as a kid, during which time he also had a hawk. (I learned this from Wizard-mandated readings of the recent Marvel Comics prequel series, The Dark Tower: The Gunslinger Born.) He’s still got a hawk that he uses.

5) Somehow, The Dark Tower mythos is tied into many of King’s other works, especially the ones with Flagg but also tons of other stuff. King became a lot more deliberate about this during the ’90s.

6) The first sentence is “The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed.”

I’ve already learned I was at least partially wrong about some of those things, but my point was that this is it–that’s all I knew. I didn’t even know if I would like the books, or if they’re worth writing about! To be cute about it, I’m in the dark about them.

So we’ll see how this goes. I may give up. I may take longer than a month to read the books. But I’ll give it a shot. It’s like a quest of my very own!

In this regard, this Dawn of the Dead is sporadically entertaining but also disappointingly fleeting; the characters are emotional vacuoles and the undead but Olympic sprinters with bloody makeup on, lacking not only personality, but conviction.

–Rob Humanick, 31 Days of Zombie!: Day 1 – Dawn of the Dead (Zack Snyder, 2004), The Projection Booth

Um, what?

I don’t like this review at all, I must say. It’s interesting to see post-300 Snyder backlash added to the usual pro forma gripe about his (excellent, curve-busting) Dawn remake, which is that because it lacked the original’s Introductory English Lit sociopolitical metaphors, it’s a bad movie. It’s also interesting to see someone complain that zombies shouldn’t be able to run because that’s not scientifically realistic. (He catches himself, but not enough to have removed it from the piece.) Unfortunately these and other assertions essentially replace any kind of argumentation from example; it’s like reading a full length review that could be replaced by the two words “it sucks” like one of those ridiculous subtitles of Tia Carrere’s Cantonese dialogue in Wayne’s World.

Via The Horror Blog.

A couple days ago I finished rereading Stephen King’s The Stand for the fourth time, I think. If it’s not his best book it’s in the top two, and it has the added bonus of boasting the best film adaptation of any of King’s works. That’s not to say that the TV miniseries of The Stand is better than Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining, of course, just that it’s a better adaptation. When your mind’s eye can take advantage of that spectacularly spot-on casting job, trotting out Gary Sinise and Ray Walston and Ruby Dee and Ossie Davis and Bill Fagerbakke and Adam Storke and Jamey Sheridan to deliver the lines, a lot of work is done for the book right there. Even in the cases where the casting isn’t nailed–Miguel Ferrer, Rob Lowe, Corin Nemec, Matt Frewer, and Molly Ringwald were all too old for their characters, for example–there’s still something right about it.

But I have found that the older I get, the more that certain flaws in King’s stuff that I didn’t notice when I first read it as a kid, or even later during re-reads in high school or college, stand out to me a bit more. In The Stand‘s case, as in It‘s case, they don’t ruin the book or anything, but they’re worth pointing out.

1) During the opening section of the book, where we’re introduced to most of the main players, the Frannie stuff is much, much weaker than the rest. From the “girl loses her virginity and gets knocked up in one fell swoop” angle on down, it’s a parade of young-adult novel clichés that makes Frannie come off like a histrionic dope. Also, everyone slaps each other. Fran slaps her boyfriend. Her boyfriend slaps her. Her Mom slaps her. Her Dad slaps her Mom. It’s almost like that Cheers routine with Sam and Diane. When you compare it to, say, how tight King’s depiction of the rise and fall of budding pop star Larry Underwood is, or how evocatively he sets the scene for Stu Redman, it suffers all the more.

2) Nick Andros disappears from the book after he meets Mother Abagail, at least as a focalizing character. Seriously, take a look and you’ll see that the entire segment of the novel set in the Boulder Free Zone is really the Stu Frannie Larry Nadine and Harold Show, with the entire story being told from their perspectives. It undercuts Mother Abagail’s protestations that she believed Nick would be the one to lead the forces of good, as well as the emotional impact of the shocking turn of events that befalls him.

3) I think something is lost in not showing the initial meeting between Stu, Frannie, Harold, and Glen’s party and Mother Abagail. That’s the hero, the heroine, the Basil Exposition, and the Gollum figure right there, and that’s an oversight. It may also be a way for King to dodge explaining how Mother Abagail didn’t catch on to Harold from the get-go.

4) I think the ending–the very ending, after Stu and Tom get back to Boulder–feels rushed. Who keeps Kojak, for example?

That stuff being said it really is a remarkable book. The unfolding of the superflu epidemic is just magisterially well done and very frightening, and quite brutal in its depiction of the government and military to boot. By rights the Flagg material should be vastly less interesting, but he’s a magnetic villain whose evil manifests itself in constantly startling and entertaining ways, like those constant litanies about how when birds hear him walking they fly into telephone poles, and if he walks through a building project guys hammer their thumbs, and if he looks at you funny your prostate goes bad. It’s like if John Cougar Mellencamp became some sort of mutant Hitler.

This week’s Horror Roundtable: Name your favorite fictional depiction of the Devil.

Chester Brown is doing a zombie comic.

It sounds like it’s going to be kind of goofy and maybe a little in-jokey, but–and I stress–it’s also going to be a zombie comic by Chester Brown.

About as bad as can be.

J.R.R. Tolkien on his friend C.S. Lewis’ The Chronicles of Narnia, as quoted in “Down the pub with Tolkien and C. S. Lewis: The original ending in the Shire and the influence of the Inklings,” Jon Barnes, Times Online. The article’s really a review/highlight reel of Diana Pavlac Glyer’s new book The Company They Keep: C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien as Writers in Community, a study of Tolkien and Lewis’ Oxford writers’ circle the Inklings. It sounds fascinating. (Via Andrew Sullivan.)

Kim Thompson of the great comics publisher Fantagraphics pays homage to George A. Romero’s great zombie movie Dawn of the Dead in one of those “two great tastes that taste great together” deals.

These days I tend to find black T-shirts with a huge visual that was originally designed for a movie poster or album cover or some other mode of presentation a bit too clumsy looking, but there are some exceptions, usually particularly striking horror imagery. My prize Hellraiser T-shirt, the only shirt I’ve ever re-bought after wearing one out, is one of them; this one’s pretty great too, in large part because of that no-nonsense font on that amazing tagline.

Via Flog!

In Colombia, the motion-sickness drug scopolamine is being used by criminals as a “zombie drug,” robbing its victims of free will. It gets blown in their faces and prevents the target from resisting rape, robbery, and murder. More here.

Christopher Eccleston, who co-stars as the villainous character called the Rider in the upcoming fantasy film The Seeker: The Dark Is Rising, told SCI FI Wire that the film is considerably different from its source material….”I think there are many, many departures from the book to the film,” Eccleston said in an interview….”The novel has been hugely Americanized in the film.”

–Ian Spelling, “Dark Differs from Books,” SciFi Wire

Sounds like a recipe for success to me!

The trailer for Midnight Meat Train (note the absence of the definite article) is out, and I am very, very pleased with it. (Via Bloody Disgusting.)

I know you’ve already seen this. I just wanted to use that line. Carry on.

PS: HUCK FARVARD

Longtime readers of this blog are no doubt aware that I am a pretty big fan of Dionaea House, Eric Heisserer’s mockumentary-style multi-site webfiction project about–well, google “dionaea” and clue yourself in. For a while a film adaptation was in the works with a major studio, but after many delays and a title change, the project was dropped by the studio. In May of 2006 Heisserer told his Yahoo group that the prospect of the film receiving funding from some other source seemed promising, but no other updates have been forthcoming.

Just for kicks I started hanging around one of the sites that comprise the story, and in the comments I discovered this recently created blog, which appears to be incorporating the failure of the film version and the “death” of Heisserer himself into the fiction. Is this an official continuation, or the work of an enthusiastic fan? Does it even matter?

Snake Eyes from You Can’t Do That On Television here would like to inform you that comments have been switched off in the face of a truly colossal amount of spam, until the crack ATF tech team can get registration up and running. My email’s to the left if you really wanna sound off, though.

“Daybreak shirt”

RILEY: Had a little brother, bit. Took less than an hour before he turned.

SLACK: And then what happened?

RILEY: I shot him.

SLACK: You said nothing bad ever happened to you.

RILEY: That happened to my brother.

–George A. Romero, Land of the Dead

I don’t recall I how I stumbled across this, but here’s a chilling piece on a family cursed with hereditary fatal insomnia.

And get your Croatoan on with amateur hunters for the lost colony of Roanoke.

The other day I said that any modern-day action movie that tried to out-batshit crazy Chuck Norris’s Invasion U.S.A. was doomed to failure. I said that because of scenes like these:

(SPOILER ALERT on this next one…)

But the more I watch these two Internet-only John Rambo trailers, the more I feel like I may have to eat my words.

It’s hard to judge based on trailers alone, but it seems to me that the reason that John Rambo stands to be far more successful at being viscerally exciting than the self-aware (read: “self-conscious”) approach of Shoot ‘Em Up is that it’s not setting out to be crazy. It’s setting out to be extremely violent, which is has some venn-diagram overlap with crazy but is not entirely contiguous with it, and thus far it’s really good at what it’s setting out to do.

Monster Brains presents a gallery of 16th-century Hieronymus Bosch knock-offs.

Golden Age Comic Book Stories presents a three–part gallery of Berni Wrightson’s totally-wrong-for-the-book illustrations from Stephen King’s The Stand.

I am such a sucker for water monsters that I find this screencap from So Bad It’s Good’s review of The New Swiss Family Robinson totally fascinating and frightening.

Finally, the New York Times and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum present a gallery of Auschwitz SS members at play near the death camp.

How much money have you spent on a single horror-related item? That’s this week’s Horror Roundtable subject. Made me feel like a cheapskate.

1) How great is it that David Cronenberg is making crime movies?

2) How great is it that Viggo Mortensen is a movie star?