Christmas and Other Horrors

A little under a month ago, Lee Harris, editorial fleshy part of the Angry Robot, approached me to see if I'd like to contribute to a "twelve days of Christmas" series of blog posts, wherein the Robot's newest converts would get a chance to introduce themselves to a captive (not to mention soon-to-be-enslaved) audience.  Well, what could I say but yes?  (Assuming I wasn't looking for an early trip to the rehabilation factories, that is?)

Then, for some preposterous reason, I decided the best thing I could do would be to write a brand new story.  Because, with the deadline for Crown Thief rapidly approaching, the release date of Giant Thief even closer and a new day job on the horizon, what else would I possibly be doing with my time?  The truth was, though, I'd had an idea for a little seasonal monstrosity bouncing round my brain for months - ever since the name "the Santa Thing" had somehow washed up on those squishy pink shores - and I'd never had time to throw together more than a few lines.  Nor was it the kind of idea I really wanted hanging around there for too long.  What better opportunity to extricate the icky little blighter?

It was touch and go for a while (most of the last three weeks, to be exact) but I got my story done.  It's called A Study in Red and White, and you can read it here.  It might not make your silly season any happier or brighter, but it should exponentially increase the odds of you violently attacking and / or running screaming from the next supermarket Santa you see.  And for me, that makes it all worthwhile.

If I had one sensible idea throughout the whole episode, it was approaching my brilliant artist mate Duncan Kay to lend me his talents for an illustration.  Because nobody in the whole wide world draws monsters better than Duncan.

You want proof?  Here's your proof, whiskers.

Also, while we're here, quick thank you's to the ever-reliable Tom Rice and the ever-writing-great-stories-that-everyone-should-just-go-read David James Keaton for their lightning ninja proof reading skills.

And if you happen to go click on that Angry Robot link up there, why not maybe check up on the other eleven Christmassy blog posts?  They're rather good, y'know.

When There's No More Room in Hell, the Dead Will Serve You Breakfast

I haven't exactly been quiet about how much I admire David James Keaton's work.  His story in the Comet Press Death Panel anthology was my personal highlight by a mile - yes, even more so that my own! - and I've liked everything he's done since.  But nothing more so than his magnum opus (so far), the epic and epically screwed up zombie novella Zee Bee & Bee, A.K.A Propeller Hats For the Dead, first published in Comet Press's follow up to The Death Panel, Deadcore.

So you can imagine how I'd be pretty chuffed when Keaton asked me to write the foreword for the new extended e-book edition he's been putting together.  Nobody's ever asked me to write a foreword before!  I may have raved a little.  I may have applied a degree of praise normally reserved for potential messiahs and people who save babies from fires.  I may, in fact, have used so many superlatives that it threatened to break the English language at some fundamental level.

That's okay, though, because Zee Bee & Bee really is great, Keaton's work is well worth shouting about, and the package he's put together here is an absurd bargain, not to mention exactly the kind of thing that the e-book as an emerging medium is well suited to.  Where print publishing has all but abandoned the novella, e-publishing fits it perfectly - not to mention leaving room for extras like Keaton's own characteristically eccentric introduction, a drinking game all but guaranteed to hospitalise all involved, and my own humble, humbled foreword.

Zee Bee & Bee the director's cut novella edition is available from Amazon US and Amazon UK for about the price of one of those big Mars bars that are really just too small Mars bars in an oversized wrapper.  Which is going to do more damage to your heart and intestinal tract?  I think we all know the answer to that one.

On the other hand, you can't buy Mars bars instantaneously on Amazon.

Now, because I have nothing else at all useful to say and this post is a teeny bit short and I may never get to write another foreword ever, here's an extract:

In the midst of death we are in life, and the best zombie fiction has nothing whatever to do with the deceased.  Who are these characters who shamble through the darkness spouting movie quotes and tearing strips - both literal and metaphorical - off of each other?  Who are these losers, these crazies, these no-hopers who can no longer tell life from death, game from reality, sex from violence?

As the spiritual godfather of this novella would no doubt point out ... "They're us."

Comet Press Release Great Book That I'm Not In

While it's totally against the unstated policy of this blog and everything I personally believe in to praise any magazine or anthology that doesn't contain my work, I'm going to make a brief exception to mention the most recent release from Comet Press, the delightfully titled Deadcore, because a) it's was really good and b) I was published alongside fifty percent of the featured authors in Comet's last collection, The Death Panel, so in a way, I figure I'm kind of honorarily, or perhaps spritually, or maybe just emotionally, in this one too.  Or some damn thing.

Anyway, while I'm breaking one age-old rule, I'm strictly adhering to my other, oft-stated policy, which is to find things to post about here in the most lazy ways imaginable.  So here, word for word, is the review I recently posted on Amazon.

First up, I should probably confess that I bought this for a particular story - David James Keaton's Zee Bee & Bee - after seriously liking his tale in an earlier Comet Press antho, The Death Panel. I'm not such a fan of zombie stories these days, since the subgenre's been done to death and back over the last two or three years. So while I was greatly looking forward to one of the four novellas here, the others I approached with a little trepidation.

That bit of bias out of the way...

For me, Randy Chandler's Dead Juju wasn't a great start. Chandler's writing is sharp and stylish, but the story he presents and the targets he seemed to be aiming for just didn't work for me. Dead Juju is a string of gory, in places wildly tasteless vignettes strung together with a fairly weightless story. In terms of zombie movies, we're in Braindead and Return of the Living Dead territory here, only this isn't half so tongue in cheek. Chandler seems to be going flat out to shock, but that obvious determination in itself takes away the edge. There are also some weird technical problems, with character arcs beginning too late in the game, disappearing for too long, or ending in wildly unsatisfying fashion. All of that said, I'd be quick to admit that this just isn't my kind of thing. So if you're happy with a high gore-and-shocks to story ratio then you may find Dead Juju the highpoint of the whole collection.

I've already said that I bought this for Keaton's Zee Bee & Bee, and it didn't disappoint even a little bit. Keaton combines smart, subversive high-mindedness with flat-out genre thrills like no one working today, and Zee Bee & Bee pulls off that balance about as well as you could hope for. It works just as well as an odd, slightly silly, weirdly romantic horror comedy, a heartfelt love letter to the width and breadth of zombie culture, and a wild and witty deconstruction of everything that's come before it. It reminded me a lot of my favourite zombie story, Bobby Conroy Comes Back from the Dead by Joe Hill, and I'm not sure if it hasn't even supplanted it.

Having read what I came for, the last thing I was expecting was to hit another novella that I liked just as much. So Edward Erdelac's Night of the Jikinki came as a hell of a surprise. Samurai? Zombies? Child-eating monks? All played completely straight? Yup, and not only that, Erdelac writes with an elegance, clarity and clear passion for the relevant history that keeps his twisted creation firmly on the rails. If Kurosowa had ever made a zombie movie - well, even that probably wouldn't have been quite this cool.

Lastly, we have Ben Cheetham's Zombie Safari, perhaps the toughest of these tales to rate. It kept me entertained, Cheetham's writing was fine and his descriptions vivid, I liked the creepily implicit back-story and there's a fantastic battle sequence towards the end. But there were stylistic hiccups that irritated the hell out of me, like the narrator's incessant to-camera exposition or the way every abbreviation was then explained in brackets, and the whole thing was dragged down by a lack of fresh ideas. So, a pleasant enough read, but not a standout.

To sum up, then: a couple of stories that didn't quite work for me, a couple that thrashed the zombie genre like a red-haired stepchild and laughed while they do it, all collected in a very nicely presented tome. Or, to put it another way - a much-needed reminder of why I've always thought zombies were the greatest of all horror monsters.

Friendly out in Theakers # 31

A few snippets of news as the year grinds to a close. First up, the new issue of the ever-wondrous Theaker's Quarterly Fiction is available for free download or purchase from Lulu. Not only does it contain my story Friendly - a wildly batshit tale of interplanetary relations and disturbing alien sportsmanship - but one can also find a tale by Alison J. Littlewood, going by the name of Day of the Bromeliads. I was introduced to Alison through the oft-mentioned-here Mr Rafe McGregor, and have since had the pleasure of catching up on a lot of her previous work - which is uniformerly great and well worth tracking down, perhaps via her website. I can't say much else about the issue, since I'm waiting for my dead tree copies to arrive from Lulu, but the cover is tremendous and TQF is never ever less than entertaining.

Not really news as such, but I finished my copy of The Death Panel, as published by Comet Press and containing my Rindelstein's Monsters, and by heck it's a good collection. Of thirteen stories, five knocked my socks off, and of the rest only one failed to float my boat, (not my own, I hasten to add). In fact, hey, I'm just going to come out and say it: David James Keaton's Nine Cops Killed for a Goldfish Cracker is the best short story I've read in ages, Keaton's the next damn Charlie Huston, and - if you have the faintest liking for hard-boiled crime or horror - you'll be screwing yourself if you don't pick this one up.

Now, since I'd like to actually get in a little writing while I'm here, the other news'll have to wait a day or two...