NIGHTMARES ILLUMINATED. The column for horror evangelists. 051

There is a lot that needs stating. No order of address presents itself as superior. Here then is a random brain dump.

That is right, illuminated instead of illustrated. How come? Well, if you read the final couple of entries that were published under the latter banner then you already know why. To sum up, I no longer wanted to concentrate solely on comics and graphic novels in a column, preferring to take a more general and esoteric view of horror, periodically focusing on literature, music, and film. After a few years I suffered a comics overload. I needed to vary my diet. Here it is.

“Illuminated is a little pretentious, isn’t it chubs?” Sure, I can see how it might sound that way. My thought here is I am shining a light, so to speak, on things I have seen/heard, not that I am explaining anything to anybody. Thing is, I wanted to keep the “NI” shorthand, and I wanted to column to sound about the same, title-wise, as before. Under these conditions, there are limited options. I landed on “illuminated.” That is as deep as it goes.

“51?” As I have been trying to imply, I am reorienting, not starting over. So, yeah, it is 51. I also do this whenever I change banks and have to get new checks*. I just keeping going with the next number on the new checks rather than starting over with “1”. Same idea here, and about as important.

“Where you been, bub?” Thanks for asking. I have been away from the keyboard for many months. I have not really been doing anything important in that time. Looking for money. I took a long road trip through the Rockies and down into the desert. That was fun. At this very moment I am sitting in my office behind a fortress wall of boxes filled with books because I am moving across the country yet again. Listen, any of you out there needing advice on life in general, let me tell you something: do not move around all the time. It is expensive. It destroys your wealth and savings. And wherever you end up you find out it is not so much different than where you were before. No matter what, you are still you, and if you are me maybe that is the problem. All temporary issues now being resolved, I have set down to write this in order to reacquaint myself with the world of the “column.” Have I mentioned it before, that this is not a blog, it is a column? If not, let it now be known.

Enough of the preliminaries. Let us join hands and kick out each other’s stool. Enjoy the duality for a moment. OK.

This 51^st column being a little different from its predecessors, I thought I would go ahead and sample the four major groups from which I intend to draw raw materials in the coming months: literature, illustrated literature, film, and music. One each.

My god I hate moving. The packing. The lifting. The going. The unpacking. It all is daunting. I needed something to put me in the right, constructive frame of mind so I choose to listen to the new Goatwhore release, Constricting Rage of the Merciless (Metal Blade 2014), to calm my nerves. If you have never heard of Goatwhore, then you are not going to enjoy this set. The music is on the death metal side, but I would say it is a little too lighthearted in the vocals to fit fully into that category. Fast, but not really thrash, either. The band has been quoted as referring to themselves as heavy metal, so I will go with that description. The title of the album lets you in on the theme, and here are a couple a song titles to help that feeling sink in: “Heaven’s Crumbling Walls of Pity,” “Poisonous Existence in Reawakening,” and “Externalize This Hidden Savagery.” What I like particularly about the band is the consistently creative guitar arrangements, actual live drumming that enhances the programmed percussion tracks, and Falgoust’s vocals that are exactly the right gruffness for my taste. I have never been able to get completely on board with death and black metal vocals that were unintelligible growling and screaming. For me to get all the way into the music I have to be able to understand what is being said at least most of the time. Goatwhore fits the bill. As much as I liked 2012’s Blood for the Master, I like this new one better because it sounds more like real phenomenon to me and that earlier effort left a more manufactured ring in my ears. Anytime Goatwhore is playing I will stop and listen, and Constricting Rage of the Merciless makes that habit a compulsion. Highly recommended.

Did I mention how much I hate moving? Besides listening to music while you pack boxes, you can also choose to take a couple hours off for a movie to reset your synapses, if you can squeeze it in. Unless you live where I do. The movies playing now at my local megaplex include titles that at first blush read like they have potential: Guardians of the Galaxy, Hercules, Lucy, Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, The Purge: Anarchy, and Transformers: Age of Extinction. Let’s look at them back to front. The Transformers franchise is cotton candy and I have always been more of a savory kind of guy. I do not want to see this new one because the previous ones have been unpleasant experiences. I was never a fan of the figures or the cartoon or the comics so that might be a strong signal pointing toward an explanation of my not liking the movies, either. How about The Purge: Anarchy? The first one was nonsense. Will this one be better? I will never know. The reboot of the Planet of the Apes was more a victory of technology than storytelling and this one looks from the trailers to be more of the same. Reviews have been pretty good, some of them, so maybe I am wrong – I will find out when it shows up on cable. I really wanted to see Lucy but the plot description included in the trailer is such horrifying bullshit I cannot bring myself to part with a tenner for it. I want to. But I just can’t. There would be much more to the plot if they tried to do less with it. Hercules? Oh boy. Which brings me to my greatest sadness in the list, Guardians of the Galaxy. I loved the reboot comic from a few years back (not the newest version, the Dan Abnett one from 2008). Great writing, beautiful artwork…good times. So now the movie version has to be a 3D atrocity, doesn’t it? Sure it does. I hate 3D. Believe me, I will be getting into this in the coming months. For now I will leave it at hate. I could go see it in 2D, a strategy I sometimes employ when desperate measures are necessary as they clearly were with Pacific Rim, for example. I could not miss a daikaiju movie. But the problem here is that the best things about the Guardians of the Galaxy book were the characterization and the story – in other words, the first two things out the fucking door in a 3D movie in order to make room for the special effects. So I am afraid to see it. I am a quivering vole fearing the hoe. I do not want to be disappointed. Now, then, Guardians of the Galaxy is another wait-for-cable movie. What that means for the purposes of moving distraction is I have been watching all twelve Friday the 13^th movies on my laptop having recently acquired digital copies from the Blu-ray tin. Things could be worse.

I have written a lot about comics over the past few years. Too much, many have said. For this re-inauguration entry I have decided it would be fun (for me) to look at something I have never considered before. Archie. Even when I was a kid I did not read Archie comics except for the occasionally one I found under the hay in the barn, forgotten there by the previous generation. Not a fan. Then in my mailbox does appear Afterlife With Archie. An horror comic with Archie and the crew. How ridiculous. A casual observer would automatically assume that the writers have just Scooby-Doo’d it up for Archie and played it for laughs, right? Since I did not have anything else to do except pack all those boxes, I decided to go ahead and read it. Issue number one opens with Jughead showing up at Sabrina’s (the teenage witch) house holding Hot Dog (a dog) who has just been hit by a car. “I need your help.” At this point I thought to myself, It is only page two, I can still get out of this now and escape permanent brain damage. Never one to take good advice, I read on. Surprisingly, Hot Dog dies. That’s a little rough, killing a dog. People love dogs and get mad when even an imaginary one dies. And then, Sabrina decides to help Juggie raise the dog from the dead, Pet Sematary-style. Sabrina gets banished for breaking the rules and Hot Dog comes back feral and chomping. Jughead turns into a zombie from the Hot Dog bite. Mayhem ensues. This book is surprisingly horrifying compared to my assumptions about Archie. It is still fairly low impact, but it is a genuine horror comic. Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa is writing the book and the appropriate illustration work is done by Francesco Francavilla. The first arc, the zombie story, runs through issue five. Number six starts a Cthulhu story. It is Archie fans, I am guessing, who will like this most, but general horror comic readers can find something to enjoy here too. Look at me. I found something. Veronica dressed as Vampirella at the Halloween party was fantastic.

I get dozens of novels every month for review, more than I can read. I have to make decisions with sometimes very little information about which ones I will read to review because I cannot do them all. This time, I decided I would pick a new book by an author I was familiar with but did not like very much hoping to be pleasantly surprised. It is a long shot, but this is a new day and it more or less worked out with Archie in the comics section. The winner is Alien Hunter: Underworld (Tor 2014) by Whitley Strieber. As far as the author goes, I absolutely and without reservation loved his early novels. My favorite was The Night Church (1983) – an unusual choice – but I am also enamored with Wolfen (1978), The Hunger (1981), and Black Magic (1982). And then Warday (1984) came out and I jumped off the bandwagon. Standing at a distance it all looked downhill from there. It has been thirty years and he has published thirty more books. Strieber deserves another look. So I looked. This book is the latest entry in the Flynn Carroll alien fantasy series. In this reality, there exists a secret force that tracks down alien criminals operating on earth, sort of like Men In Black but without the humor. It is hard to complain about the plot because it is a fantasy in the first place. Saying something here was unrealistic would be like complaining about The Lord of the Rings because elves do not really exist. The writing, then. Strieber is a veteran and he puts together sentences and paragraphs with technical proficiency. The dialogue is good, if a little broad. The whole package is an order of fries – it is a quick, peppy experience that is enjoyable at the time then quickly forgotten. No complaints, really, given appropriate expectations, but this is not a book you are going to keep on your shelf after you have read it because it will never occur to you to read it again. Digestible.

All right then. That is it for now. Back to the goddamned packing. I will return with a new bag of fries before you realize you have finished this one.

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*a “check” is a payment instrument used in olden times to settle debts.

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