Read: Wolves of the Calla--"Mia"; "Palaver"

Wow, November. I'm starting to feel like Roland. Who apparently has been at this whole "quest for the Dark Tower" thing for 1,000 years, which is lame because it busts the scale of his journey wide open and spills his mortality all over the floor. It's fine that time is wonky, but you still need to place your hero's life against the backdrop of a finite span of years or else his quest loses any sense of urgency. I'm certainly not the first person to point out that immortality has this effect. I know Roland's not really immortal, but same difference.

Also in the "oh brother" category for this section: yet another obnoxious split personality for Susannah, although at least this one has the decency to slither around naked and covered in mud while eating small animals alive; the revelation that Roland and Company's Fistful of Dollars reenactment in the Calla will be interspersed with thrilling New York City real-estate acquisition action in the Mighty Maine-Man Manner; and oodles of self-congratulatory there's-no-such-thing-as-a-coincidence synchronicity. While the first two faults are probably more troubling in the long run because they indicate a fundamental misunderstanding of what is interesting about these books on the part of their author, it's the third that irritates the most at the moment. Look, it's really not that impressive that the number 19 keeps popping up--Stephen, you're the one making that happen. Shit, you re-released the previous four books in large part so you could slap that number after the table of contents. Same thing with the name of the big-shot farmer in the Calla being the same as a Western author the bookstore owner mentioned to Jake two books back--Stephen, you named the character that! It's all so transparently forced; none of it creeps up on you from between the cracks in the text like these sorts of mystical coincidences are supposed to do.

I remember the first time I read a book and realized not just that I didn't like it, but that it was poorly written. It was a Kevin J. Anderson Star Wars novel in which Luke or whoever really needed to find potential Jedi to train. Any guesses as to whether an amazing ancient Jedi-detector device gets found within a few chapters? Home runs are a lot less impressive if they're clearly the result of tee-ball.

Comments seem to be working even on old posts now, so go ahead and put in your two cents. Woo!

Read: Wolves of the Calla--"Overholser"

I didn't read much and don't have a whole lot to say about what I read, other than the more of the made-up lingo and speech patterns King gives us, the more I enjoy it. It comes so natural! Say thankya, I beg, if it do ya fine...I totally want to throw these onto the ends of all my sentences. This is actually quite an achievement on King's part, because anyone who remembers reading Spider-Man 2099 as a high-schooler will tell you that invented dialect is just a "what the shock?" away from complete insufferability.

Aside from that I had two insights:

1) For a while now I've been giving myself a hard time for giving King such a hard time about this 19 business. You may not know this about me, but the use of the 23 enigma and the Law of Fives in The Illuminatus! Trilogy blew my goddamn mind and was a philosophical and even political touchstone of mine for years. It was also just plain entertaining as hell to read. Isn't King just doing the same thing? The answer is no, because RAW and Shea didn't just slap a number into their books out of nowhere--they dug up every conceivable iteration of 23 and 5 (and sometimes 17) in the real world, and used that as the springboard for their characters' birthdays and the number of potential ways to immanentize the eschaton and so forth. Doing that is a far cry from being all "wow, this supporting characte's' name is 19 letters long!" as though you, the author, had nothing to do with that.

2) I want to finish these books so I can find out how it all plays out, but honestly I think I could read the wikipedia entries and find that perfectly satisfying in terms of the main reason I'm reading this series, which is to unearth the secrets behind King's cosmology.

I don't think Steven Wintle at The Horror Blog has gotten nearly enough attention for his series of mini-interviews called Scarred, in which horror notables from Anne Rice to Judith "They're coming to get you, Barbara" O'Dea share their memories of some work of art or fiction that frightened them. So I'm doing my part.

Using a charmingly democratic process, Shoot the Projectionist has assembled its list of 31 Flicks That Give You the Willies, which is another way of saying the best horror movies of all time. Interestingly for a list assembled from the votes of film buffs and horror fans, it has a lot more in common with AOL/Moviefone's general-audience countdown than it does with Richard Corliss's showoffy Time list.

I interviewed Bryan Lee O'Malley about his new book Scott Pilgrim Gets It Together (Volume Four in the Scott Pilgrim series) and you can find the results at Comic Book Resources. WIN!

(Pictured: What might have been.)

Read: Wolves of the Calla--"The Way of the Eld"; "Todash"

You could probably look at this section as an illustration of how bloat affects these books. During their palaver with the Calla's representatives, and again during their todash journey to NYC77, each member of Roland's ka-tet is given a sentence or two to ponder or comment upon nearly everything that's said, done, or seen. Even the neutral narrator takes too long to get to the meat of the story, wasting time on unnecessary and uninteresting details. I'm not sure we needed to know that the plates Roland had Jake use to show off his targeting prowess were still greasy, you know? Normally I'd support that kind of attention to detail, but the book fairly groans under the weight of all that accumulated minutiae.

An abridged version might have cut to the chase, and given these chapters' standout sections a little more space to shine. For those keeping track at home, those standouts included Roland's todash flashback to the battle of Jericho Hill, the last stand of the gunslingers. In a thrilling "Charge of the Light Brigade"-type sequence, we learn how Roland's pals Alain and Jamie De Curry bought it, we see Cuthbert take his fatal wounds and still insist on going down shooting and cracking jokes, and we get the pretty glorious image of Roland leading his surviving troops in a suicidal charge against the enemy ("the barbaric remnants of Farson's forces" or something to that effect, implying that Flagg/Fannin/Farson/Marten/Walter/Man in Black/Dark Man/Good Man/Ageless Stranger/Walkin Dude/Wizard/Maerlyn/Legion/etc. had already buggered off, abandoning his followers now that the main work of destroying civilization had been accomplished) while screaming "NO PRISONERS! NO PRISONERS!" That's pretty much the Roland I want to see.

The other highlight was the Calla residents' description of what happens to the roont twins when they're sent back by the Wolves. The most horrifying aspect is how the poor kids grow from child-size to over seven feet tall in the span of a year to a year and a half. The process, vividly described as like teething for their whole bodies, leaves them screaming and crying in near-constant agony, which their ruined brains can't possibly process. Now, this is the kind of thing it might have been better to be shown rather than told during palaver, but aside from that it's pretty nightmarish, one of the first genuinely horrific images these books have conjured up in a long time. It's also a key to really appreciating Tian Jafford's desperation, and to hating the Wolves something fierce. That should help sustain me through the fallow periods before we finally get to see Roland charging the bastards, screaming "NO PRISONERS! NO PRISONERS!"

Jon Hastings at The Forager takes a cue from my illustrated favorite horror-movie list and presents his own. It's bigger (50!), it eschews the "horror" label to encompass scary movies that might not fit within the genre, and though he doesn't come out and say it I think it's even ranked in order of preference.

May I humbly suggest that if you enjoyed his or mine and have a blog, you post your own?

* * * NOTE (Nov 1, 2007): We are sorry to report The State DVD is now NOT being released this fall. We worked closely with MTV to make a great DVD set with lots of extras for the show, and the DVDs are completed, but they has chosen not to release the set at this time. We don't know why.

--statement at the official State website

Take it away, 30 Days of Night vampire atheist!

Read: Wolves of the Calla--"The Pavilion"; "Dry Twist"; "The Priest's Tale (New York)"; "The Priest's Tale Continued (Highways in Hiding)"; "The Tale of Gray Dick"

I find I have a hard time articulating exactly what I mean by "bloat" in the context of these books, but this section is maybe the best example yet. Essentially what you have here is a book within a book, a story that could easily have been its own, completely unrelated Stephen King novel. (Or at least as "completely unrelated" as any two Stephen King novels are anymore.) Finding out what happened to Father Callahan after he wandered out of 'Salem's Lot, infected and de-consecrated by the vampire Barlow's blood, is a wonderful idea for a story, and not even King's strange insistence on having so much of his action happen in the past as recounted by the character involved rather than unfolding in the present moment before our eyes sucks the wow out of it.

And it's not just the very basic idea that's cool. The hierarchy of vampirism that Callahan uncovers, the mysterious and frightening presence of these "low men" who serve the mysterious big bad the Crimson King (like I said, not quite completely unrelated) and are hunting him for his actions against the vampires, the super-creepy moment he realizes that the graffitti and lost-pet signs around his hang-outs are actually messages posted by his pursuers to pinpoint him--all of that is absolutely fascinating. Callahan's ongoing struggle with alcoholism and his Kissing Jessica Stein relationship with his friend at the homeless shelter are even on hand to provide the standard King human element.

Slapping all of this into the middle of a Dark Tower book has the dual effect of making Callahan's story feel somehow undercooked and unfinished, and making the main narrative feel lopsided and elephantine. It's still fun material, but I don't see how it or the larger Wolves of the Calla story benefit from the way it's inserted here instead of standing between its own two covers. I'll burn through the chapters until we get to the conclusion of Callahan's story, no doubt, but that's kind of a problem, isn't it?

This week's Horror Roundtable is about our first horror-movie memories. Mine's pretty rad.

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.

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.

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.)

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!

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

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?

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--"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?

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.

Waterboarding is something of which every American should be proud.

--Deroy Murdock, "Waterboarding Has Its Benefits," National Review Online

(Via Andrew Sullivan)

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)

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)

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.

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.

Oh.
My.
Fucking.
God.

(Found here. Via Matt Maxwell.)

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?

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)

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.

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.

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.

Norman Mailer looked like Ed Asner with more hair.

Even though the thought of voluntarily subjecting myself to more Stephen King at the moment isn't a particularly appealing one, I heard good things from a friend who saw an advance screening of The Mist, which the trailers had kind of turned me off of. (Just seemed too ersatz Spielberg; I prefer the real thing.) MTV's got a whole bunch of clips from the movie up. I really hope it's good. (Via Bloody Disgusting.)

Read: Song of Susannah--"6th Stanza: The Castle Allure"; "7th Stanza: The Ambush"

If you know me well, you could have probably guessed that I'd get excited when they started mentioning Discordia. Basically that's just another word for the primordial soup in the King-verse, though, and not a crazy goddess, so oh well. A lot of other "oh well" answers are forthcoming in this chunk, mainly in chapter 6. Mia is white, she might be a demon, there's like six big-deal demons who are each both male and female, the one who had sex with Roland in the willow jungle and the one who had sex with Detta when Jake crossed are the same demon, that demon took Roland's sperm and impregnated Detta/Susannah/Mia with it so that's whose baby Susannah is carrying, his name is Mordred just like in the Arthurian legends and he's gonna kill his dad, blah blah blah. It's a boring cosmology.

Meanwhile, the evil genius overlord of the vampires and the low men and shit, Richard P. Sayre, devises a foolproof plan to kill Roland and Eddie by sending in the same mafia goons who the pair wiped out in an alternate reality earlier in their adventures together. How could that possibly fail?

A final self-indulgent twist sees our heroes get rescued by some just-folks flannel-wearing "ayuh"-saying guy in Maine. So in a series that, need I remind you, began as Conan starring the Man with No Name and at one point included a giant cyborg bear, we now spend a paragraph or three marveling at how people from Maine pronounce words like "boathouse." (Bwut-huss, if you were wondering, which you weren't.) Turns out that's how the people in the Calla pronounced it too! Isn't that amazing? No, you're right, it's not.

Matt Maxwell does my "list your favorite horror movies" thing, but uses quotes instead of images.

Bloody Disgusting's "huge" interview with Clive Barker is up. It's actually not so huge, as it turns out, but it's interesting as you'd expect it to be thanks to quotes like this:

I cried at the end of The Exorcist when she touches the cross that is hanging around the neck of the priest and dimly remembers what she was saved from. That got me. Yes, you’re not going to weep in the middle of a Freddy Krueger picture and I’m not writing Hellraiser for tears. I’d rather people wet their seats with urine. That’s the nature of horror stories. I’d like us to be doing more than just telling horror stories. Why can’t we tell the Doctor Zhivago of games? Why can’t we do the Lawrence of Arabia of games? I use the David Lean model only because he was telling these massive narratives, which had extraordinary emotional fuel, and the battle scenes still remain definitive benchmarks. Without the aid of CGI he still made battles scenes more exciting than George Lucas could or indeed Peter Jackson could by multiplying infinitely the number of Orcs. So what I’m saying is let’s look for the models within cinema that are plausible, that we can reasonably aspire to. I only tend to cry in a movie during a moment of triumph. I see no reason why a game shouldn’t do that.

Read: Song of Susannah--"8th Stanza: A Game of Toss"

Even though I read it today, I had to flip through this chapter before starting to write this post just to remember what was in it. As best I can tell it exists to point out that Roger Clemens is a good pitcher, that people in New England like the Red Sox a lot, that Eddie dislikes that Calvin Tower character, and that King thinks that 'Salem's Lot is "a corker" of a book and that he himself is a pretty nice guy. Mostly it makes me wish that I could use Black Thirteen to go back in time and stop the goddamn fucking Red Sox from ever winning a World Series ever, just to ruin King's day.

Seriously, what the hell, people. This is not entertaining. You people who encouraged me to stick with this? I'm coming for you.

Read: Song of Susannah--"9th Stanza: Eddie Bites His Tongue"

I'm tired of King's faux-humility when having characters talk about him. "Maybe he'll amount to something. What if he becomes famous or critically acclaimed--the chances are remote, but still." Horseshit. Dude, you are the most popular author in the history of the world. Dine out on that instead of making your characters skeptics about your prospects and crowing to yourself "I showed them!"

Also, are we supposed to share Eddie's astonishment that the plot of Wolves of the Calla is the plot of The Magnificent Seven and the name of the town is the name of the director? If not, are we supposed to be entertained by watching him realize this? If the answer to either of those questions is yes...I just hate you people who wanted me to read this more and more, basically.

I mean, really, fucking up in The Drawing of the Three by saying Co-Op City is in Brooklyn and then making that part of the stories' continuity?

I did wish Eddie killed Calvin Tower, because then a) there'd be one less of these annoying assholes to read about, and b) maybe then they'd lose their quest for the Dark Tower and the bad guys would win pluck the goddamn rose and knock down the goddamn Tower and wipe everything out. I am totally rooting against everyone in this book now. Even Roland. He could have put bullets into all these other douchebags four books ago.

Man Trying to Escape Police Eaten by Gator

Listen, folks--y'all who told me to keep going? I don't really hate you. I'm not really going to hunt you down. I don't know if this constitutes a spoiler for the next entry, but I'm actually pretty happy with you right now. Just wanted to clear all that up.

Read: "10th Stanza: Susannah-Mio, Divided Girl of Mine"; "11th Stanza: The Writer"; "12th Stanza: Jake and Callahan"

Hey.

Hey!

Not bad!

Not bad at all!

The Susannah stuff was fine--I like the idea of Flagg serving as Mia's Archangel Gabriel, I like the use of science to produce magical results. That's nice and perverse.

And despite all my worries and fears, despite chapter after chapter of dreck leading up to it, the appearance of Stephen King as a character in his own book was...pretty great! A few things won me over:

1) King comes across as charmingly out of his element. Just the fact that anyone comes across charming was a treat after spending time with the likes of Calvin Tower and Detta Walker for the last few books. But character-King seemed genuinely at a loss as to what the hell was going on--no "it's ka" for him until they put him under hypnosis, pretty much.

2) This is related to the first point, but whatever godlike attributes character-King may have in terms of his role in creating Roland, his friends, and their worlds, he's not in control of them, meaning he himself is not godlike. That is a huge relief for me. Why? It's hard to articulate, but if we got the sense that nothing we've read about would exist if character-King hadn't dreamed it up it would invalidate the whole affair. Instead, we're told that the larger forces of good, evil, and fate at work in Roland and company's adventures would still be at work whether or not King put pen to paper at all. King's more their vessel--an important one, I guess the third-most important after the Dark Tower and the Rose, but still just a vessel. This means that (within the context of The Dark Tower series) his fictions are not, strictly speaking, fictional. Phew. He's a part of them more than they're a part of him.

3) King further cuts down the too-cute-by-half nature of his metafictional conceit in the following chapter, when Father Callahan muses that while certain things might only exist in this "real world" they're currently inhabiting, evil corporation North Central Positronics would exist in all worlds, just because the Crimson CEO King is a dick like that. Now, while there's no real way for us to verify whether Roland, Eddie, Callahan, Jake, Oy, and Susannah have ever traipsed around this big blue planet of ours, you and I can look around and see that there's no such thing as North Central Positronics. That means that even the book's "real" world with its "real" Stephen King writing "real" novels like 'Salem's Lot and Carrie is NOT, in fact, to be considered real--in other words, the fourth wall is never truly broken.

The story keeps on rockin' with the "Jake and Callahan" chapter, too. Their mental duel with Black Thirteen was a hoot and gave you a sense of how risky it is to mess with that thing, their Butch-and-Sundance attitude to their impending doom in the Dixie Pig is the kind of fatalistic heroism that makes Roland such a fun character to read about, and even the pretty breathtakingly brash decision to loop 9/11 into the storyline has the "that's so crazy it just might work" brio of great conspiracy fiction.

Look, is it the direction I would have taken things in? No. I don't think I'd ever have brought the gang back to America ever, let alone with the frequency King has, let alone to visit the author of the books. It just seems to me that Roland's world is rich enough to want to explore on its own, not least because it isn't King's America, which we've seen plenty of in virtually every one of his other books. But if you are gonna go there, these last two chapters are about as good as you could hope for. For the first time in ages I'm having a good time reading these books and can't wait to turn the page. Hooray!

"Mentally Ill in Serbia are Abused, Report Says," Dan Bilefsky, New York Times. Photo by Mental Disability Rights International.

(Via Blue Texan.)

Read: Song of Susannah--"13th Stanza: 'Hile, Mia, Hile, Mother'"; "Coda: Pages from a Writer's Journal"; Wordslinger's Note

HAhahahahahahahaha!

What a great ending! I laughed out loud. But I would, wouldn't I? It involved something I'd wanted to do for 3/4 of this book, i.e. killing Stephen King. Ha! So I guess I was definitely right about this being at a remove from the real world, even in "the real world." Great!

Before we get that far we finally do something fun, or even just not boring and annoying, with Susannah and Mia--their deliriously bugshit trip through the Dixie Pig and into the maternity ward from hell. King really outdid himself in this passage, one of the very, very few in the entire series that's actually scary, and easily the craziest thing in it this side of Shardik the giant cyborg bear. Vampires, red mutant rat-people with distended teeth and human-face masks, cannibals that sound almost exactly like Grandpa from The Texas Chain Saw Massacre eating roast human babies on a spit, bird-people in Duke T-shirts, and evil gynecologists who act like all this is perfectly normal. That's what I'm talkin' 'bout! God only knows why it took this long to get there, but I'm not going to look a gift horse in the mouth.

So, I'm looking forward to watching Jake, Callahan, and Oy come in guns blazing against a restaurant full of monsters. I'm wondering what the loose end is regarding that John Cullum dude Roland and Eddie met in Maine and why his mention of his mysterious friend in Vermont gave Eddie the willies. (It's entirely possible that plot thread gets picked up in an totally different King novel, or is a plot thread continued from one, but whatever.) King's reference to seeing Armageddon in the "Coda" section has me hoping for a full-on monster apocalypse a la the rant the Ghostbusters went on in the mayor's office. And of course there's all the cool stuff we already have seen prophesied about what'll happen when Roland comes to the Dark Tower--winding his horn, singing his fallen comrades' names, doing some unimaginable battle. Let's get it on!

Please go check out Monster Brains' unbelievably awesome gallery of Ogoh-Ogoh monster statues from Bali.

Read: The Dark Tower--"Callahan and the Vampires"; "Lifted on the Wave"; "Eddie Makes a Call"

Three elements combined to put me in a good mood in starting to read this, the final volume in the series. (The journey's almost over.)

1) The last quarter of Song of Susannah was really good.

2) The inside front jacket copy starts thusly:

All good things must come to an end, Constant Reader, and not even Stephen King can make a story that goes on forever.

Despite appearances to the contrary, it only feels that way!

The tale of Roland Deschain's relentless quest for the Dark Tower has, the author fears, sorely tried the patience of those who have followed it from its earliest chapters.

You don't say! All kidding aside, this level of self-awareness is refreshing, as well as funny.

3) In addition to a passage from Robert Browning's "Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came" (obviously) and Bad Company's "Bad Company" (knowing King's taste in music, also obviously), the epigraph page also contains this:

What have I become?
My sweetest friend
Everyone I know
Goes away in the end
You could have it all
My empire of dirt
I will let you down
I will make you hurt
--Trent Reznor

I did not see that coming! NIN quotes always put me in a good mood.

Now I'm three chapters deep, and so far, so good. I'll admit that I wanted to see Callahan go down in a bit more of a blaze of glory. His demise was fun and dramatic, but it might have been nice to see him take the whole room full of Grandfather Type One vampires (and by the way, how fucked-up and awesome are they?) with him. As far as the wonky todash concept goes, the "todash tidal wave" that Roland and Eddie get swept up by ain't half-bad. And I even kind of dig the idea that this random John Cullum guy (note the initials) will suddenly step up and save the day, like the Arliss Howard character in Natural Born Killers. Would I spend so much time in the conclusion of my epic Western sci-fi/fantasy quest series arranging land deals and organizing corporations? That's a big negatory, but, y'know, it's not super-distracting at the moment.

More monster shoot-outs, more unimaginable battles, more winding of horns and storming of towers, kthx. But so far so good.

Read: The Dark Tower--"Dan-Tete"

I'm starting to feel like King saved up all the weirdness and horror stuff for the final 1.25 volumes. After all that it's starting to feel like an odd gear-shift, but I'll take it. Watching a newborn baby with a boner mutate into a giant cannibalistic spider with a baby face growing out of its back like a tumor and then eat its own mother? I'll take it indeed!

Susannah, of all people, gets the first big bloodbath against the Crimson King's monstrous minions, massacring the motley maternity-ward crew. (Alliteration!) I was glad to see Flagg-manqué Sayer go down. I feel like King should have come up with a better reason for Susannah not to have killed Mordred the spider-baby than "she missed a few times," but still, a pretty good showing. Even the uncredited cameo by C-3PO, aka Nigel the Robot, was a hoot.

Hey, here's something that just occurred to me: After the age of magic ended, North Central Positronics built mechanical means of preserving magical phenomena such as the Beams, right? Like, at Shardik's den, they built the big metal generator thingy, not to mention Shardik himself. But if North Central Positronics is a front for the Crimson King, and the Crimson King's goal is to break all the Beams, why would they have preserved them in the first place?

Read: The Dark Tower--"In the Jungle, the Mighty Jungle"

Jake's adventure in the bowels of the Dixie Pig made me think of video games again, and it occurred to me that their multi-environment "go here, do this, beat that" structure isn't quite as unique as I thought. They've actually got a lot in common with children's fantasy stories, which in my experience involve a kid who gets thrust into a series of situations with no real logical ties to one another, and has to "solve" his or her way out of them through actions that also frequently wouldn't logically achieve that result. Think of The Neverending Story, for example: Atreyu and his horse ride through a swamp that makes you suicidally depressed to get acquire information from a centuries-old giant turtle who's allergic to youth, then after the horse bites it the kid gets rescued by an albino luck dragon. Or The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe--open a closet, meet Mr. Tumnus. Or Alice in Wonderland with "Eat Me/Drink Me" and the rabbit hole. Not all that different from Mario jumping on evil mushrooms to save a princess, is it? Nor is it all that different from a private-school kid beheading half-man, half-animal cannibals with dinner plates, then switching bodies with his pet in order to dodge a giant cartoon triceratops conjured from his imagination by mind-reading movie projectors. Fun stuff.

SPURGEON: So what's next?

COTTER: No staples. At MoCCA people would come to the table getting books for review, and people would say, "We don't want staples." Chris maybe printed up 1500 of this and we just sold out of #1. I hear people say that when there's a collection they might be interested in it.

--Josh Cotter, creator of the excellent comic series Skyscrapers of the Midwest, interviewed by Tom Spurgeon

It's pretty striking to hear distaste for the pamphlet format expressed that nakedly, apparently by the sorts of people who write about comics for the world at large.

Read: The Dark Tower--"On Turtleback Lane"; "Reunion"; "The Devar-Tete"; "The Watcher"

As he nears the finish line King's begun to directly address the reader more frequently. It reminds me of how at a certain point in The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien started throwing in the occasional "and lo!" or "and behold!", as though he himself was getting super-excited about what was going down and wanted to share that with us.

This reader is still surprised by how much crazy sci-fi/fantasy/horror stuff King's firing at us all of a sudden. I should point out that all of it's written in the usual King style and as such doesn't constitute a return to the lean-and-mean style of the original Gunslinger, as I sort of wish it would. I just can't help but feel there was another, much better Dark Tower series in some other world that kept playing in that prose playground. This, on the other hand, just feels like "Stephen King does Star Wars," which is fun but not so different than what you'd expect from him. I think part of the reason I keep pulling for more shoot-outs and bloodshed like Roland and Eddie's massacre of Jake's pursuers is that they momentarily restore that no-nonsense feel to the story.

Two quick points:

1) What happened to LaMerk Industries? Looks like they've been dropped from the North Central Positronics/Sombra Corporation evil-conglomerate roster.
2) King's mentioned the notion of evil being "outside" in several of his books, and now we learn what he means by that as Mordred contemplates Roland and his gang as they gather in a circle. It basically means that evil feels no connection with anyone else, and wants to destroy those connections because it resents that.

--Sgt. Tyler Ziegel, USMC, from "Wounded warriors face home-front battle with VA," Emily Probst, CNN.com

This week's Horror Roundtable is all about great horror-movie taglines. I only mention my very favorite, but for completeness' sake, here's my rundown:

1. Who will survive and what will be left of them? (The Texas Chain Saw Massacre)
2. To avoid fainting keep repeating, it's only a movie...only a movie...only a movie...only a movie...only a movie...only a movie...only a movie... (The Last House on the Left)
3. When there's no more room in Hell, the dead will walk the Earth. (Dawn of the Dead)
4. In space no one can hear you scream. (Alien)
5. We are going to eat you! (Zombie/Zombi 2)

Brilliant one and all.

The new Cloverfield trailer is out. It looks like it will be a scary movie.

(Via AICN.)

1) I saw No Country for Old Men.

2) Okay, I saw most of No Country for Old Men. Almost all of it, in fact. Except for the ending, during which I had gotten up to go to the bathroom.

3) I did not spontaneously combust upon returning from the bathroom and discovering I had missed the ending of No Country for Old Men. This is an achievement in sheer willpower.

4) I got to know this gentleman:

Future horror icon and Halloween-costume perennial. Guaranteed.

5) I read Jonathan Rosenbaum's infamous review of No Country for Old Men. Perhaps this is just the brain damage incurred upon discovering that I'd missed the film's ending when I got up to take a leak, but I am partly convinced this review was conjured from my unconscious mind as an embodiment of the stupidest possible way to engage with a violent genre movie. It's not just, and it's not even mostly, the unintentionally hilarious, outraged insistence that everything be about one's own politics, perhaps best represented here by the straight-faced statement that a reference to a serial killer's dog-collared victim is a "particular allusion to Abu Ghraib." Nor is it the inevitable factual error made while ignoring all other concerns in favor of getting everything point in the direction the reviewer wants it to go, in this case lambasting a character for refusing to help a dying man when it is precisely helping that dying man that gets him into the mess he's in in the first place. No, the review's philosophical core is what I'll have no truck with, and that is this:

The picture of human nature in No Country for Old Men is by contrast so bleak I wonder if it must provide for some a reassuring explanation for our defeatism and apathy in the face of atrocity.

To which I can only reply (twelve months ago):

There is nothing special about your pet target. On the contrary. All humans, from every country and time period ever, are terrible. That's what great art is about. I can see an argument being made that embracing this belief is a way of letting oneself off the hook; I submit that one who makes that argument proves in so doing that he doesn't understand the belief at all.

6) I saw a trailer for There Will Be Blood, which with a combination of its title, its music by Jonny Greenwood, and post-Bill the Butcher Daniel Day-Lewis may have been the most ominous trailer I've ever seen.

Read: The Dark Tower--"The Shining Wire"; "The Door Into Thunderclap"; "Steek-Tete"; "The Master of Blue Heaven"

So that's it? He's dogged the forces of good through The Stand, Eyes of the Dragon, and six and a half volumes of The Dark Tower, and how does Randall Flagg--the villain formerly known as Walter--go out? Like a punk. Like a sucker. Popping up again only to be hoodwinked and eaten by stupid spider-baby Mordred, a character he's at least an order of magnitude more interesting and more frightening and more established and funnier and cooler than. Boo! Hiss!

To make matters worse, this account of Flagg's demise futher mucks up King's already shaky (that's an understatement) continuity. One of the few clarifying revisions King made to The Gunslinger was to spell out that Walter/Marten/Flagg wasn't a servant to John Farson, Walter/Marten/Flagg is John Farson. So what does King do just a couple years after writing that? Ignore it and say Walter/Marten/Flagg and John Farson were indeed two separate people. Why? Your guess is as good as mine. Ditto the new assertion that Walter/Marten/Flagg was once a full-fledged human being and is approximately 1500 years old, rather than the indescribably ancient demon he's tagged as in The Stand, a book superior to this series in every way including positing an interesting origin for Randall Flagg.

The thing that really rankles here is that we King readers have been following Randall Flagg for just as long as we've been following Roland Deschain, and through better books for that matter. To punk him out like this just plain feels like a rip-off, and once again displays a shocking lack of understanding of what is interesting about these books. Having your new big bad kill the former big bad is the oldest trick in the book writers have for making the new villain look dangerous, but that's not what happens here. Here, you just wish there was no new big bad, because the original one was just fine, especially after King informs you that no matter who he's nominally working for, Flagg is always looking out for number one. That's the kind of villainy I can get behind!

So. Now the guy who teleported out of Las Vegas in time to avoid a nuclear bomb blast has been eaten alive by a psychic spider, and we're left with--what, exactly, as an antagonist? Nothing all that frightening, to be honest. The Crimson King is by all accounts crazy, and no more an "antagonist" for Roland than late-seasons Uncle Junior was for Tony Soprano. His minions, as represented by Pimli Prentiss and Finli o' Tego, the head honchos at the Blue Heaven telepath gulag, are basically working stiffs; I know this is King's attempt to say "and the Nazis were just regular people too," but I don't care, it's still an incredibly uncompelling set-up for the books' big climax. I guess Mordred is kind of a villain in the classic sense, but not really--he's a grumpy kid who hates his dad and likes to eat. I want Randall Flagg's gleeful, giggling nihilism and swagger.

Finally, I don't care about Ted Brautigan.

There's a cameo by the Wu-Tang Clan's Ghostface Killah, who goes by the nicknames Tony Starks and Iron Man and has sampled the old IM cartoon heavily, and is basically the exact kind of smooth, rich, talented badass Iron Man should be. Someone on this movie gets it!

Bonus points to Ghostface for referring to himself in the third person as "the kid" throughout the interview.

(Via Pitchfork.)

Read: The Dark Tower--"Tracks on the Path"

This brief interlude with Roland and Jake hinges on two of the characters' most endearing traits: Roland's near-inability to be caught by surprise, as it turns out he's known Mordred has been tracking them; and the sad love between Roland and Jake. The latter was the emotional heart of the series' first and best book, and while it's depressing that the prose here is not that volume's equal, it's at least comforting to see some weight given to the deepest, darkest, most complex relationship the main characters have established. As I've said before, if these books starred only Roland and Jake (and Oy), they'd be better.

"It was unprecedented, absolutely amazing. The sea was red with these jellyfish and there was nothing we could do about it, absolutely nothing."

--John Russell, managing director, Northern Salmon Co. Ltd., "Billions of jellyfish wipe out N. Irish salmon farm," AP, CNN.com

Read: The Dark Tower--"The Last Palaver (Sheemie's Dream)"

The thing in the world that makes me the saddest is roadkill. Roadkill makes me so, so sad. This is because when an animal is hit by a car on its way someplace else, that animal isn't dying for a reason--not even for a bad reason, like avarice or ignorance or cruelty. That animal dies for no reason. Its death is literally pointless.

With Sheemie's beautiful nightmare King has finally sold me on the threat to the Dark Tower, and why maybe neither Flagg/Walter's death nor the lameness of the Crimson King and Mordred as villains ultimately won't hurt the sense of urgency to stop the Tower's destruction that much. Different people may have their own reasons for helping the destruction of the Beams and the Tower along--the Crimson King and Blaine and Jack Mort because they're crazy, Mordred to spite Roland, Walter/Marten/Flagg to try and sneak in and take over at the last minute, Pimli and Finli because they're hard workers and get satisfaction from that, the Breakers because they need to feel appreciated and can't face the truth of the circumstances behind why they're appreciated, the low men out of religious fundamentalism, the vampires because they like killing things and eating them, Rhea for revenge and cruelty's sake, Balazar's mafia and the Big Coffin Hunters because it pays well, Ben Slightman Sr. because he wants to protect his kid and maybe get something out of it himself, Andy the Robot and the Wolves because they're programmed to, John Farson and his followers because they hate the prevailing order that props the Tower up--but what it all adds up to is nothing, no reason. The Beams are being broken, the Tower is being knocked down, reality is being destroyed, joy and beauty are being torn apart and replaced by the sad, meaningless entropy of the first few books which itself will then be replaced by nothing at all, all ultimately for no reason at all, other than that's what happens to good things in this world.

That dream is one of the best things King's ever written.

My wife is emetophobic, which means she's afraid of vomit. In order to go to the movies she needs to get a reliable "vomit-check" first to make sure she's in the clear. There are a few trusted friends we use as sources--paradoxically, they tend to be the people who find vomiting hilarious, which means they'll remember it if they see it--but there's also a great website called Kids in Mind that non-judgmentally lists any questionable content (down to its most minute, like someone sneezing) so that parents can judge whether a movie's appropriate for their kids. They'll list vomit as part of their "violence/gore" subcategory, but of course they list everything else. So I'm sitting here as Amy goes through the listing for The Mist to see if she can see it, and while there's apparently no vomiting in it she just keeps going "Eeeewwwww...eeeewwwwwww...eeeeeewwwwwwwww...OH MY GOD EEEEEEEEEWWWWWWWWWWWWWW!!!!!"

Needless to say, I'm pretty psyched to see this movie now.

SEMI-QUASI-SPOILER WARNING FOR THE MIST. What I'm about to say isn't itself a spoiler, it's more like a clue that could lead you to intuit a spoiler. But I would still heartily recommend that you DON'T READ ANY FURTHER if you haven't seen The Mist.
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Okay, everyone gone?
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You in the back?
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Okay, right. Now then.

Is it too much to ask that when a movie adaptation of a book changes the book's ending in some top-secret fashion, they don't SPOIL THE FUCKING NEW ENDING IN THE FUCKING COMMERCIALS?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!

SPOILER WARNING. Real, straight-out spoilers this time. So if you haven't seen the movie, don't read this, even if you've read the book--certain additions and changes are most definitely blown below.

So, The Mist. I went with it all the way till the end, until I got so mad that the dumb fucking studio fucking spoiled the fucking ending in the fucking COMMERCIALS (soldiers in hazmat suits using flamethrowers, um, HELLO) that I basically stormed off in disgust. It was only in the cold light of this disillusionment that I realized the movie wasn't scary at all. Gross, sure, and intense in its gore, but never frightening, not even boo-scary. Maybe that last is because if you've read the novella, you know pretty much every major monster beat, with the exception of one new addition that's such a flagrant Aliens rip-off that you know what's coming anyway. The one thing that really succeeds on horror terms is the creature design, which takes a lot of the critters in directions that are both entirely faithful to the book and totally not what I would have expected, from the almost centipede-like tentacles to the death's-head faces of all the insectoid beasts to blowing up the unseen lobster-monsters to King Kong size to shrinking the giant monster that walks over the jeep at the end but making it this creepy cthuloid mess that you can actually see rather than just a few giant legs that trail off into the stratosphere. But, and I stress, while some of this is cool, none of this is actually frightening, and horror movies should be scary. So, fail.

Ditto Mrs. Carmody. Never the most nuanced depiction of religious fundamentalism, she works in the novella because--well, because I read it for the first time when I was in 7th grade, probably. But let's be generous and say she works because of the deliberate, lurid, pulpy quality that was King's stated aim with the piece. By casting the younger, thinner, less central-casting Marcia Gay Harden, they had a chance to do something really precise and nasty regarding the apocalyptic fervor that lies beneath your garden-variety evangelical, but instead she chews the scenery like Elmer Gantry with the occasional "hi I'm actually a nutball" tic thrown in for seasoning. (I found her oddly sexy, though. I actually think this was a deliberate move on the movie's part--as time passes and she exerts more influence on the survivors, her hair comes down and her behavior gets more and more passionate.) Tom Jane's star turn as David Drayton, the lead, is hit and miss. His tough-guy act feels like just that, but he's oddly excellent at conveying grief and horror. The supporting cast shines, though, I'll give the movie that. Andre Braugher is just perfect as Brent Norton, better than the character is in the book; I didn't see the racial subtext coming at all, and he played it brilliantly. Toby Jones' Ollie is precisely the lovable little guy he's supposed to be, William Sadler's Jim is convincing in his journey from blustery douchebag to repentant would-be good-guy to broke-down cult member, and William DeMunn, who's really given the single most important bit of acting in the whole film as he's the first person we see to really react to what's lurking in the mist, aces the assignment.

It's actually the filmmaking that's the best part of the movie. And I don't mean the CGI, which actually gets a lot better than that opening tentacle salvo (shame they had to lead with the least convincing visuals). Frank Darabont uses jump cuts, zooms, hand-helds, fades, and an extremely judicious application of score to create a ragged, urgent rhythm. In terms of camerawork and editing it's one of the more impressive horror films to come along in quite a while, simply because it's doing stuff I can't remember seeing in a horror film, and doing it pretty well. The best illustration is probably that initial panicked run through the parking lot and into the supermarket by DeMunn, which again is depicted in a way I wouldn't have anticipated from reading the novella yet fits perfectly with its sense of unexplained, impending chaos.

What about the ending, then? I don't have any problem with the mist dissipating and humanity coming out on top, since I'm actually pretty fascinated with the idea of apocalypses that end before the world does. Nor do I have a problem with Dave mercy-killing his companions, including his son; this was set up in the book and it's completely believable. And as I mentioned, shock and sadness are handled really well by Jane, who's given an awful lot to sell to the audience in this scene and does it. The problem is just that the ending feels like what it is, which is slapped on. First of all, it cuts the entire affair short--the mist is gone, there's no cryptic radio message from Hartford, perilous journeys to Connecticut, eking out a living with a band of survivors tirelessly searching for a solution, or all the other good stuff that your imagination unfurled before you when you reached the end of the novella. That's that. Secondly and more importantly, we haven't really gotten to know these characters beyond their stock roles. Unlike the comparable units in the first two George Romero Dead movies, for example, none of these five has done anything surprising, nor have they grown and changed from the people we first met, really. They're just there, so this horrible ending that befalls them is just there too. Finally (and I'll admit this just may be where I'm at right now) all the King-fan in-jokes--from the fact that Dave starts the movie painting the poster for a movie of The Dark Tower to Mrs. Carmody's quoting the Trashcan Man's catchphrase to the Castle Rock Gazette on the newsstand to various King idioms and neologisms peppered throughout the dialogue--naturally undercut the movie's effort to earn the seriousness of a quadruple murder/infanticide and attempted suicide-by-monster that turns out to have been completely unnecessary.

Ultimately, I'll just say it's not as good as the book. Sometimes that doesn't mean much. In this case it means a lot.

Read: The Dark Tower--"The Attack on Algul Siento"; "The Tet Breaks"; "Mrs. Tassenbaum Drives South"; "Ves'-Ka Gan"

Bloodbath! Not since the shootouts in Mejis back in Wizard and Glass, and maybe not even since the massacre in Tull allllll the way back in The Gunslinger, have we seen the gunslingers cut loose like this. I enjoy that their methods go beyond the Thermopylae "pick the right place" strategy and generally dive straight for no-bones-about-it ambushing and shooting people in the back. They're rough customers.

So naturally King starts killing them off in the least entertaining order possible, leaving my pick for "please off this one first," Susannah, as the last non-Roland, non-Oy gunslinger standing. It certainly takes cojones on the author's part to insert a race to prevent his real-life car accident right after the death of one of his main characters, and make it lead to the death of another. The problem is that the deaths aren't as affecting as they're supposed to be because, as I pointed out way back when, we've never been sold on Roland's transformation from the grim hardcase who'd let a kid die rather than deviate from his quest to the loving den mother of his rag-tag bunch; it just sort of happened when King jettisoned the spare style of The Gunslinger for the busy Kingisms of The Drawing of the Three, as though the prose tics did the work for him. We're supposed to feel this great ocean of grief overwhelming us, but I'm still not sure why. But because of this, the "King" material doesn't bug me as much as it otherwise might. I actually like his character better than Eddie, and Jake throwing himself in front of a speeding van to save a guy is the kind of thing the kid would do, so that's okay too. (It also helps that we've already had a great Jake death scene in this series.)

One thing I'll grant The Mist is that its monsters are threatening the way Hostel's torturers or 28 Days Later's infected or The Texas Chain Saw Massacre's Leatherface is threatening. There's no hardy-har-har-it's-a-monster stuff or pauses to stand slackjawed and gawk at them "wow!"-style, reinforcing that it's just a movie, like, at all. The film convincingly articulates the idea that if you see these things coming after you, you will either have to kill them or be killed yourself. I feel like it's been a long time since a movie did that with non-humanoid monsters--the bug sequence in King Kong stands out in that regard too, but before that you'd have go back to, what? They still weren't scary, but you did at least feel that kill-or-be-killed panic.

Via Infocult comes word of these astonishing hidden underground temples in the Italian countryside. Started in 1978 by an eccentric businessman and built in complete secrecy beneath the earth's surface over the course of 16 years, the temple complex is 20 times the size of Big Ben.

Shades of everything from Foucalt's Pendulum to Coldheart Canyon.

Read: The Dark Tower--"New York Again (Roland Shows ID)"; "Fedic (Two Views)"; "The Thing Under the Castle"; "On Badlands Avenue"; "The Castle of the Crimson King"

Another chunk of the final book in the series, another ad for another Stephen King book that apparently it would have really helped to have read before getting to the climax of a seven-volume fantasy epic. I'm getting kind of tired of that, though I do take comfort from the fact that Roland seems no more anxious to read Insomnia than I do. But in a way, each of these King-centric interludes--the notion that character-King doesn't always get the messages from Gan right so that's why so much stuff in all the books that touch on the Tower mythos contradict one another; the idea that the reason there's just so much shit going on in these books is because it's basically being dictated to him by God and his usual process of narrowing and editing isn't in effect; capping off the constant references throughout the series to graffiti artist "Bango Skank" by basically giving up and calling him "the Great Lost Character"; even the fact that King himself is a character in his own magnum opus--embody the problems they purport to explain and describe. There's nothing wrong with these books that a red pencil couldn't fix, but try telling that to a guy who thinks this stuff's being beamed to him by divine intervention.

A few more trims and the strong stuff here would stand out. And there was strong stuff. The scary things under the castle, for example--the creepy doors to historical atrocities, the sound of a mouth full of fangs chewing endlessly behind a flimsy portal, that big giant centipede monster refugee from "The Mist" or "Jerusalem's Lot." The use of relentless, non-fatal chilliness, slowly driving Susannah and Roland into desperation. The three goofy Stephen King lookalikes (how great would it be if they were King's first appearance in the series?) and their unpleasant fate. The Crimson King sitting on a throne of skulls while ordering all his followers to their deaths. I'll even grant you the meeting between Roland and the heads of the corporation dedicated to facilitating his work in America. There's almost enough stuff right there for a good book, but what you've got is about, I dunno, one-eighth of a gigantic overstuffed monstrosity that is itself one-seventh of an even MORE gigantic overstuffed monstrosity.

I'm also pissed because it felt like Flagg was going to be in the Crimson King's castle but he wasn't. Rip-off.

This week's Horror Roundtable asks us for our favorite horror novels. Mine might surprise you given my mood of late.

Read: The Dark Tower--"Hides"; "Joe Collins of Odd's Lane"; "Patrick Danville"; "The Sore and the Door (Goodbye, My Dear"); "Mordred"; "The Crimson King and the Dark Tower"; "Epilogue: Susannah in New York"; "Coda: Found"; "Appendix: Robert Browning--'Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came'"; Author's Note

Hey, everyone.

Hey, Constant Reader.

There, in the scarlet field of Can'-Ka No Rey, I heard the sound. The Horn of the Eld.

Would you like to know what it sounded like?

Okay.

Listen closely...

Hark thee well, may it do ya fine...

It sounded like this.

-----

I don't know what I was expecting. Not in terms of the ending itself; I totally expected that one. (God bless you, Bruce B., but like I said, you sure did spoil that sucker.) I mean in terms of the quality of the ending, the whole build-up included. After everything I've read and everything I've written about it, for some reason my hopes were up. Shoulda known better! But I wanted to believe.

I wanted to believe that the likes of the Three Stephen Kings, the evil stand-up comedian, and a guy with Harry Potter hand grenades couldn't possibly be the best final bosses King could come up with for his goddamn seven-volume fantasy epic.

I wanted to believe that the successful resolution of the quest of Roland, this great lone warrior who strode the sands of time and space alone even when surrounded by friends, friends he almost inevitably led to their deaths on his behalf, wouldn't hinge completely on the godlike actions of another character we'd never met until the book's final chapters--unless you'd read another goddamn Stephen King book first, and if you hadn't, hey, visit your local bookstore!

I wanted to believe that King would stop belaboring points that were painfully obvious to everyone, perhaps, but his own entranced self. That maybe he wouldn't spend three full pages unraveling an anagram obvious to every single reader the second he had a character think "hey, why do those words look familiar?" That maybe he wouldn't draw out the question of why the evil stand-up comedian cut the erasers off the pencils of the idiot-savant deus ex machina when it was plain as day that he could use them to erase things out of existence.

I wanted to believe that Mordred, who as both character and nemesis started lame and hadn't improved, wouldn't die the way he lived. But c'mon, you've gotta grant me this one. The whole sixth book was building up to this sucker's birth! He was supposed to fulfill some prophecy (that we'd never heard before, but still)! He was named after the infamous Arthurian patricide! And he totally killed Randall Flagg (in the most bush-league and anticlimactic way possible, but still)! Surely he'd do something really cool and important and unpredictable before it was all over! Surely he'd do more than just run at the gunslinger's camp in spider form, get shanghai'd by Oy, and get shot to death like a bobcat who smelled the food in their RV? I mean, that would be incredibly stupid and a colossal waste of time for it to play out like that, wouldn't it?

I wanted to believe I wouldn't literally be mocked and berated by the author of this series for wanting to read a satisfying ending. I thought maybe that this would be at least as important to the author (whether or not he'd truly deluded himself into thinking he was transcribing this nonsense rather than writing it himself, as he so frequently claimed) as it was to me. Shit, they sure would have been better books if it had been!

I wanted to believe the payoff would make the pain in getting there worthwhile.

Oh well!

I'll tell you this, though: I actually liked the resolution ("resolution") to Roland's storyline just fine, as I predicted I would. It's a good idea, and it fits. And interestingly, the prose in the section leading up to and following the revelation that Roland's about to do the time warp again took on the tone of The Gunslinger, which is obviously a treat to me. I guess it's appropriate considering that he goes directly to Chapter One, do not pass Go, do not collect $200, but if there's one thing I've learned from reading The Dark Tower Saga it's not to expect the appropriate, and not to look a gift piece of good writing in the mouth when it comes along. So yeah, that part was just fine. It's just everything that surrounded it that was either infuriating, insulting, or uninteresting. And need I even list the loose ends forever untied? From Bango Skank to the fate of the Grandfathers, from what Nort told Allie to what happened to Black Thirteen on 9/11, from LaMerk Industries to Rhea of the Cöos, from why the Mejis portion of Roland's pre-The Gunslinger story was filled out in such detail while the rest was sketched in or ignored completely to the unimaginable battle Roland was supposed to wage at the Tower (please don't tell me it was this ridiculous skeet-shooting game he played with the lame-ass Crimson King)...I mean, it was like King wasn't even trying. Wow, is this whole "hey, I'm just the messenger" business a convenient excuse.

As for me? Well, now I'm done, which is a good feeling, let me tell you. It's also the longest blogathon I've ever done, by a long shot. That much at least I'm grateful for. I learned I could read and blog about what I read every day for a long time, which I'd tried in the past and couldn't keep up. I think I got something out of the exercise of reading every day and picking apart what worked and what didn't in what I read. I think I was able to articulate certain ideas about genre and storytelling, and pinpoint what both what excites me about them and what leaves me cold. I think I learned a lot about where writers can go wrong, but I also learned that it's possible to zig where they zagged. And it was a lot of fun interacting with the comment crew. I totally felt like it was a group effort.

Was it worth it? I don't know. This is certainly the most time I've ever spent reading books I didn't like all that much outside of a classroom environment. I can't really say I enjoyed it. I can't really say I'm glad I followed the advice of everyone who encouraged me to stick with it, the books get better, I'd come around. They didn't and I didn't. I don't think the nuggets of goodness scattered throughout the seven volumes were worth the junk I had to wade through to get to them, and not just because of the junk in and of itself--I worry that exposure to that junk will leave me less favorably inclined to the Stephen King books and stories I'd come to know and love and really treasure before I laid eyes on the damned Dark Tower, and that's a real tragedy, because those books mean a lot to me. Time will tell.

Go, then. There are better books than these.

I saw Battlestar Galactica: Razor a couple weeks ago, but it aired last night and finally people are talking about it, and a friend of mine asked me what I thought. I thought it was okay. Had its moments.

"Sean--that's all you got?!?!"

Yeah, that's pretty much all I got. It wasn't the most inspiring thing in the world, for good or ill. If it were just a regular episode I'd just shrug my shoulders and say "let's see what happens next week." But I'll try:

* One thing that bothers me is that they didn't show any physical affection at all between the Pegasus Six and Cain. I thought that was a cop-out. Not just because I want to watch sex scenes between Tricia Helfer and Michelle Forbes, though I do, and often, but because every other couple (Tory and Anders for gods' sakes!) gets their steamy slap'n'tickle sessions on camera for all to see. Why not the Gina and the Admiral? To paraphrase Law & Order, is it because they're lesbians? You'd think after all the flack the show is taken for not having any gay characters, when they finally did introduce them they'd go the whole hog with 'em. Especially because they're women and not guys, which makes the whole thing easier to swallow for the hoi polloi.

* I loved the old-school Cylons. I want more! (And I never watched the old show.)

* My other big beef is that we never get a real reason for Cain to be such a fascist hardass. The attack happens and boom, she's shooting her XO in the head for not sending troops on a futile suicide run. If the idea is that she was always a nut and the Cylon attack just took off the handcuffs, that should have been better articulated.

* That flashback seems like something Adama should have brought up earlier, huh? This was the same pitfall I thought they narrowly avoided with the whole "Adama triggered the first post-ceasefire hostilities with they Cylons" story because they tied in his guilt about losing his friend Bulldog and that made his silence feasible. No such excuse here.

* I get impatient with fiction drawing out things we've already figured out long ago, it's obviously a pet peeve of mine lately, but for real, were we not supposed to know that Kendra fired the first shots against the unarmed civilians?

* Still, it's Battlestar Galactica and therefore better than 90% of anything else you could watch. Kendra was a cool character and well-acted. (Her bad skin was sexy!) Adama's flashback and Kendra's confrontation with the hybrid were good and creepy. Watching the Pegaus's descent into collective madness was depressing and frightening. Lee, Kara, and Bill are still endlessly compelling.

In closing, it's a goddamn crime that we have to wait until February April for more epsiodes of this show, and until god knows when for the end of the series.

Ron Moore is blogging.

(Via Whitney Matheson.)

* Jason Adams has blogged his thoughts on Battlestar Galactica: Razor. Like me, he thinks that the lack of on-screen canoodling between Tricia Helfer and Michelle Fobes smacks of rainbow-flag cold feet; also like me, he thinks it ranks with your average okay BSG episode. I think that normally this wouldn't be a problem, but when you're debuting something as a feature-length movie, selling it as a stand-alone DVD, and using it to tide fans over during a year-long hiatus that is itself under the shadow of a strike that may postpone or even eliminate the series' final episodes, okay probably isn't good enough.

* Jason has also blogged his thoughts on The Mist, which he says he "mostly dug." His main complaint, a pretty fundamental one, is basically that the whole never added up to more than the sum of its parts. That sounds about right to me. Aside from obvious missteps like Mrs. Carmody it's hard to point to anything disastrous about the film (even she isn't so); everything works, but nothing works wonders.

* Jon Hastings is Mistblogging too. He liked it quite a bit, except for the ending, which (like me) he wasn't crazy about not because he objected to it in principle but because he found it tacked on. Amid interesting comparisons to 28 Weeks Later, Spielberg's War of the Worlds, and Romero's Dead movies, he articulates in a roundabout what I think is the core appeal of this story, namely that the monsters aren't waiting around stalking the humans, but that they're going about their everyday business of eating each other, stopping only to dine on something more readily available whenever the humans happen to cross their paths. That was what was so scary about the original story, and what also makes even the un-scary movie adaptation compelling (and re-watchable, even to me): Yes, the world of the mist-creatures is infiltrating our own, but the result is more akin to our world being plopped in the middle of theirs. (The novella made this more explicit with its earthquakes and great rifts in the ground, meant to evoke the shifting or perhaps even replacement of our earth's crust to match theirs.)

* While he's at it, Jon offers this dead-on observation about "inherent silliness" in genre works by way of musing on big creepy monsters and their discontents:

As for the goofiness issue: different people will bring different standards to the table, and, I've noticed, very few people are consistent about it. That is: some people will balk at taking stories about super-powered mutant heroes seriously, but have no problems with stories about the living dead. Other people might be completely down with the whole flying dudes in tights thing, but just can't believe that anyone over the age of 12 would be interested in stories about a teenage wizard. In generally, I'm pretty accepting of any kind of fantasy element and while I recognize that it's pretty common for folks to draw a line somewhere or other, I can only just wrap my head around doing that.

Bingo! Jon notes that The Mist takes its monsters dead seriously, which is one of its strengths.

* Jon's post also got me thinking about The Mist's kind of surprisingly (to me at least) lackluster take at the box office. I tend not to think about box-office stuff at all anymore now that I don't work at Wizard, so the main reason it surprised me is that I read a post on the blog of one of the big horror websites that theorized it could have a $100 million theatrical run. In retrospect I realized that this kind of thing is one of the reasons I've learned to ignore the big horror websites in terms of prognostications, criticism, or anything other than news. I think I really got the message around the time they started worrying about what Hostel Part 2's failure "meant for our genre." A) It's not our genre, that's goofy; B) It failed because it was bad; C) In the short-term it means fewer shitty Hostel and Saw knockoffs will get greenlit, which is fine; D) in the medium-term it means some good horror movies might have a harder time finding distribution and an audience, but that's always a crapshoot even in the best of times; E) in the long-term it won't mean anything, because as we've seen time and time and time again, dozens of crappy Exorcist-Omen / slasher / self-reflexive / WB-stars-in-peril / Sixth Sense / J-horror / '70s-remake movies can come and go and the kinds of people interested in making good horror movies will continue to make them in new and unexpected ways, and now we can just add torture porn to that list. In terms of The Mist, Cloverfield will still make a lot of money, and The Mist will end up with Carrie and The Shining on the perennial "hey, there are a few good Stephen King movies" articles that media websites run at Halloween, and it'll make up its money on DVD if not in the theatres (and I can't imagine it cost that much anyway) and we'll all live happily ever after. The reason to be upset if horror movies don't find an audience is if they're good movies and people would enjoy them.

* I found this pan of No Country for Old Men by Fernando F. Croce fascinating insofar as it repeatedly uses the movie's acknowledged strengths as exhibits for the prosecution. Much like Jonathan Rosenbaum, Croce cites the wholly successful use of Chigurh as a figure of horror as a failure. He does it by calling him "some peevish bad-guy out of Diamonds are Forever," though, which is a lot (intentionally) funnier than anything Rosenbaum said. Also like Rosenbaum, he cites the Coens' articulation of a bleak worldview as a failure, and though he faults it for its aesthetic shortcomings rather than its political ones, I of course agree with this argument no more than I agreed with the other one. Finally, and again like Rosenbaum but also reminiscent of the critics who lambasted Children of Men for its proficiency, he continuously cites the Coens' ridonkulous level of skill as filmmakers as a sign of emotional paucity, which as a student and lover of film is utterly baffling to me; you'd think it'd indicate the opposite. Finally, Croce misuses the words "decimated" and "et al," which is a dick move of me to point out, but I find that sort of thing funny when it's done by someone who's obviously a good writer. (Via Keith Uhlich.)

* I liked this Dick Hyacinth post ranking the different types of continuity gaffes. Continuity is a tricky thing. As you might have gathered over the years, I'm a bit of a snob and find a lot of continuity-heavy superhero comics tedious, but I'm also a bit of a nerd and find a lot of continuity-heavy superhero comics delightful. I've come to think of continuity as one of the pleasures of superhero comics if used entertainingly. I think complaining about continuity in, I don't know, Green Lantern is like pointing to a Conan novel and saying "this book requires you to know a lot about Conan." Well, duh. I mean, hopefully it's enjoyable on other levels, hopefully it's not just a wikipedia entry with sequential art illustrations, but the continuity is what it is. Anyway, I think Dick's post helps draw lines between helpful, fun continuity usage and reductive, byzantine regurgitation.

* Johnny Ryan, the G.G. Allin of humor comics, once called by this writer "the funniest cartoonist on Earth", is premiering "dozens of new paintings inspired by cult, horror and exploitation films" in an art show called, appropriately enough, HORRORSHOW, debuting this Friday at California's Secret Headquarters.

Please let there be a book of these coming out from Buenaventura or somebody.

* It feels good to be done with blogging The Dark Tower, for a few reasons. A) As I mentioned, it showed me I can handle really long-term reading-and-blogging projects, which I hadn't been sure about. I've got a couple of biggies in mind now. B) In the meantime I can just enjoy a second breeze through the wonderful World War Z by Max Brooks, which I'm doing in lieu not just of those other two projects but reading the latest Clive Barker and Chuck Palahniuk novels, too. And because it bears repeating, I want to thank my commenters and email interlocutors once again for blogslinging along with me, which is really how I felt about it. Yep, I mean all you guys who encouraged me to stick with it, too. Your sincerity and passion challenged me not just, and not even mostly, to finish the books but to try to analyze and articulate my own less passionate reactions to them as best as I could. Thanks!

* Oh boy.

* Finally, it's awesome that this is what pregnant Helena Bonham-Carter looks like.

Pix at The Daily Mail, via Jackie Danicki, who advances the absurd notion that HBC doesn't look smoking hot in that photo.

Director Ryuhei Kitamura's adaptation of Clive Barker's Midnight Meat Train has a May 16, 2008 release date. That's right at the beginning of the summer season, and I don't know what that means. The film stars Bradley Cooper, one of People's Sexiest Men Alive. (Hey, the girl on the elliptical next to mine at the gym was reading it.) He was listed under the "sexiest scars" subheading, which is oddly appropriate.

The Mist works to remove horror from its recent, needless emphasis on torture and the violent extreme.

--Clarence Carter, Reverse Shot. This of course ignores (SPOILER ALERT) the none-more-black quadruple-murder-attempted-suicide ending (the "gut-punch" "bitterness" of which is elsewhere praised), the gore moneyshots, the burn-victim closeups, and the infanticide. There's qualified praise for a supposed terrorism subtext, too. But this is to be expected, I guess, because when you go on record about how nihilism in horror is bad and politics in horror is good, but then you find yourself liking a horror movie that's nihilistic and largely apolitical, you start having to doublethink.

Returning to the "secret free space dedicated to something beautiful carved out despite the modern-day surveillance state" beat, a group of clandestine culture warriors secretly established a workplace/crashpad in France's landmark Panthéon, where for a year, completely unbeknownst to the facility's security, employees, and visitors, they labored to repair its antique clock. Nicest secret society of pranksters ever? (Via Bruce Baugh.)

* Steven Wintle interviews The Blair Witch Project directors Eduardo Sanchez and Daniel Myrick for his "Scarred" series on things that scared the crap out of horror luminaries. Turns out they're both scared of Bigfoot! Definitely worth a read for Sanchez's commentary on the Patterson-Gimlin Bigfoot footage as a source of horror and an influence on Blair Witch.

* Yesterday, striking horror writers staged an "exorcism" outside Warner Bros. in attempt to drive the demons out of the studios. Good luck with that. I found this report interesting in that it's at the SciFi Channel's website, and SciFi is of course one of the networks affected by the strike.

* In the comments below, Matt Wiegle directed my attention to another tale of a hidden temporary autonomous zone, this one a little apartment built in a mall in Providence, Rhode Island. I'm sure there's a word for little secure private architectural spaces constructed in non-secure public areas, be they outside (treehouses, the jungle boat ride at Disney World) or inside (these secret apartments), but both fascinate me to no end.

* The other day I watched Rian Johnson's Brick, starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt. It's a good movie, but what struck me the most is how Gordon-Levitt's performance gives lie to the notion that Josh Hartnett was doing anything but being a lousy actor in The Black Dahlia. Clearly it's possible to be a taciturn cipher pining after an idea of a person while surrounded by people more interesting than oneself and still convey recognizable human emotions, including the gulf of pain that would result from living like that.

* The other other day I watched Darkon, a documentary on live-action role playing directed by Andrew Neel and Luke Meyers. I think it's just about everything a documentary of this sort should be: fascinating, entertaining, sympathetic without shying away from the dysfunctional aspects of the lives of the participants, funny without being condescending. Even where it took the predicted route of casting "good guys" and "bad guys," the fact that these "roles" within the documentary framework reflected the adopted roles of the LARPers involved simultaneously undercut and provoked thought on the usual documentary sleight-of-hand. Finally, it just made you feel real good if any significant part of your life is dedicated to your own imagination. Check it out.

I'm sitting here in Panera Bread, using their wi-fi, and I've just realized they're playing a muzak version of the Alabama 3's "Woke Up This Morning," aka The Sopranos theme song. Amazing.

I was pleasantly shocked by how much I enjoyed Beowulf. I'm not a Neil Gaiman fan--nothing against him, just never read much beyond the initial volume or two of The Sandman and the very boring 1602--so my prime wasn't pumped there. I remember the poem from high school English, of course--we even did a video reenactment of it that involved the music of Pantera and Laibach that was pretty bitchin'--but not, like, super-fondly. Robert Zemeckis's last CGI foray, The Polar Express, looked sterile and creepy; this looked marginally more lifelike from the commercials and online trailers I saw, but only marginally, and it looked mostly like the kind of video game I'm not interested in playing. Moreover, you're unlikely to win me over to anything by saying "from the director of Forrest Gump." Finally, if I want to see Angelina Jolie naked (and let's be honest, I do), I can see the real thing, nipples and all, simply by googling Gia (and let's be honest, I have).

But boy howdy, was this ever the right choice for a matinee today. First of all, the commercials don't do the imagery justice at all. Seeing it in 3D on the big screen enables your eyes to parse the visual information much more easily, so rather than the supercompressed, watching-someone-else-play-Gears of War look of the ads, you get this stunning, gold-hued, you-are-there effect right from the opening shots. It's like watching the scene from Return of the King where they're riding between the oliphaunts' legs for a whole movie.

Secondly, this isn't just 300 in Viking drag. It's a monster movie, and a scary one at that, scarier and more outré than anything in The Mist, to use a recent example. Our first look at Grendel is just at a tumorous, shuddering, self-injuring, blood-gushing mass of flesh and gristle. Hell, that's what he always looks like. To overuse one of my favorite comparison points, he's Clive Barker's "Rawhead Rex" writ large, a suppurating wound on legs. Voiced by Crispin Glover's all too human and vulnerable shrieks, he's also incredibly disturbing; the audience I was surrounded by gasped and phewed audibly every time he showed up and started shouting. The visual was strong (a lot stronger than he looked on the small screen and the laptop monitor, where the design came across weak and undefined), but it also worked in popcorn-movie terms: His every appearance was boo-scary as shit.

Indeed, on the visual level, nearly everything in the film worked as well as one could hope. Computerized naked Angelina Jolie was about as steamy as the real thing; god knows she got more screen time! The dragon that does battle with Beowulf at the end of the film had real size and weight, and the fire he spewed is easily the gold standard for CGI flames. Throw in his golden color and I feel like the whole thing was a "can you top this?" challenge to Peter Jackson and WETA for the (hopefully) inevitable appearance of Smaug in the Hobbit film(s? ! ). That Jacksonian resonance is also felt, of course, in King Hrothgar, his people, and their mead-hall, the setting of most of the film; that it can be compared comfortably to The Two Towers' infamously art-directed-out-the-wazoo Golden Hall of Meduseld in Rohan is a compliment indeed.

The "actors" don't disappoint either. This is certainly where I expected the film to fall flat, based on, well, everything I know about CGI. And yeah, there are a couple of "naw, I don't buy it" moments, some involving the skin around the eyes of John Malkovich's petty courtier Unferth, most involving Robin Wright Penn's young Queen Wealthlow. To demonstrate her May to Hrothgar's December, they fill out her patrician cheekbones with baby fat in a way that looks kind of nothing like the young Robin Wright we remember from The Princess Bride. But shit, everyone else! There truly were times, as the characters portrayed by Anthony Hopkins, Brendan Gleeson, and even Wright Penn (playing the queen in the autumn of her years, her Easter Island face in full flower) strode the screen, when I thought they'd scrapped the CG and switched over to live action. Surely the greatest achievement is turning Ray Winstone, an indisputably commanding presence who nonetheless is basically doing the corpulent/dissolute thing in films from Sexy Beast to The Departed, into the computer-generated Gerard Butler. Zemeckis and company earn my undying gratitude simply for creating the Winstone-Gleeson buddy film of my dreams, of course, but it's more than that. Never once did I question the real-feel of this mead-swilling Leonidas, equal parts genuine prowess and ham-actor bluster.

And that right there is the core of the film, which given its screenwriters' provenance I should have expected to be on the thoughtful side. Turns out that amid the chest-thumping, bellowing, wench-ravishing, and grappling in the nude (and who'd have thought that when it came to crowning the year's best naked-guy fight to the death, Eastern Promises would have competition?), Beowulf is an examination of the contrast between real and imagined heroism, and the price the former pays in its transition to the latter. It may have to play fast and lose with the unnamed bard's tale of the slayer of Grendel, his mother, and the dragon to do it, but who cares? The yarn it spins is all the more engaging for it, right down to its affecting, bravely ambiguous ending (carried by the great Gleeson, much to my delight). In that way the film becomes what it's about--fudging a good story to make it great, and the potential costs of doing so.

* If you've ever wanted to see a vomiting Mr. Mxyzptlk get burned and face-stomped to death by an evil Superman, Tim O'Neil has the scans for you. Normally I steer clear of dogpiling on stuff like this, because the material is so self-evidently, almost self-parodically bad, and because I think that since most intelligent readers have already made an informed decision as to whether or not such comics are worth their time and money, the people who stick around to complain about it have similarly made their own decision, for whatever reasons, and living with it is their problem and not mine. Still, this sequence stuck out to me because it seems almost like it was intended not just to exemplify the bizarrely visceral hatred some fanboys of my acquaintance have for Silver Age DC material that doesn't jibe with current storytelling values, but to embody it. (Via Dirk Deppey.)

* Speaking of comics blogosphere warhorses I try not to ride, in an interview about the end of his series Y: The Last Man, Brian K. Vaughan inadvertently articulates why I find the periodic outbreaks of (pseudo)feminist outrage over some dopey superhero image or other hard to take seriously as either criticism or activism:

It felt like comics had never really talked about gender in a sophisticated way. Whenever they talked gender it was always like, ‘Should Catwoman’s boobs be smaller?’ ‘should she be called the Invisible Woman instead of the Invisible Girl?’

(Via JK Parkin.)

* Cartoonist Josh Simmons, the guy behind the shocking, wordless horror graphic novel House, shares some scary, funny memories of Candyman and Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me as part of Steven Wintle's "Scarred" series. He's got good taste, or at least his teenaged self did.

* Hey, look, Paul Pope is drawing Orion from the New Gods!

* Hey, look, Nicholas Gurewitch is drawing some extremely black humor in the Perry Bible Fellowship!

* Hey, look, Tom Neely is drawing more exquisite horror imagery as a means of anti-war protest!

* Hey, look, Madballs are back!

* Inspired by a recent viewing of No Country for Old Men, Rich Juzwiak of FourFour finds something funny on the DVD of Blood Simple.

* Physician Kent Sepkowitz casts a skeptical eye on the movie Awake and its use of "anaesthetic awareness" as a plot device and selling point (more the latter than the former, really).

* Matt Zoller Seitz defends Beowulf against the anti-cinetechnophile crowd. Read the comment thread, too, both for skeptical responses and a discussion of co-screenwriter Neil Gaiman's comic book work that veers off toward Alan Moore, too.

* It wasn't until my very Christian in-laws brought it up in the context of a discussion of those "hey look out for this supposed peril of modern-day living that's probably easily debunked with 15 seconds of googling" email forwards we all get from time to time by way of offering an exception to the rule, but apparently Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials fantasy series and its first volume's imminent film adaptation, The Golden Compass, are taking flack from the usual suspects for their atheistic author's atheistic message. I haven't read the books and didn't know much about them so this all came as a surprise to me. Here's the Snopes article on the emails, confirming Pullman and his books' anti-religious bent; here's Andrew Sullivan rounding up some pro and con links, including claims that the studio watered all that down anyway and the de rigeur posturing by the shameful, shameless Catholic League; and here's a SciFi Wire article on producer Deborah Forte's attempts to dodge the subject.

* So I guess Stephen King recently said some, oh, let's say "provocative" things about torture, celebrity, Jenna Bush, and Britney Spears in an interview. Carnacki is sympathetic to the Bard of Bangor's cri de coeur, MSNBC.com's Courtney Hazlett considerably less so. I'll say that I'm largely on board with the points King's trying to make, but that his attempts at pop-culture and political commentary are almost always off-putting and that metonymizing unhealthy trends in either sphere through young women who while emblematic of those trends really bear no responsibility for their perpetuation strikes me as cheap and quietly misogynist.

* I'm having fun discussing the roles of the leading men in film noir in the comment thread below my quickie take on Joseph Gordon-Levitt in Brick vs. Josh Hartnett in The Black Dahlia, and you might enjoy doing it too.

* Quote of the day:

"Her legs were gnawed to the bone."

--from "Woman killed by stray dogs in Bulgaria; Briton's legs were 'gnawed to the bone' by wild dogs," Reuters, MSNBC.com.

* Finally and OT, Matthew Perpetua nails what's up with the song "Wow" from the great Kylie Minogue's new album X. This sort of post is why he's my favorite music writer.

Fear(s) of the Dark, an animated horror anthology film directed by Blutch, Charles Burns, Marie Caillou, Pierre di Sciullo, Lorenzo Mattotti, and Richard McGuire? (Via Bloody Disgusting.)

Apparently it's premiering at Sundance? Did everyone know about this but me?

In this week's Horror Roundtable--one of my favorites ever--the group reveals the horror-movie elements that scare the crap out of us but doesn't faze most other people. My special freak-out fear is shared by at least one other participant, and I'm definitely sympathetic to most of the others. What a lily-livered bunch we turned out to be!