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A Fate Worse Than Dragons - by John Moore

Terry, a knight of humble means in the Kingdom of Medula, has undertaken a dangerous challenge in order to win the hand of his beloved Princess Gloria.  He has hunted down and killed a Dragon.

But there is a problem...a border dispute with the neighboring Kingdom of Oblongata has been resolved to Terry's disadvantage.  Instead of winning the hand of his beloved Princess Gloria, Terry has won the hand of Crazy Princess Jane.  Rather than marry Jane, Terry boasts that his squire Huggins actually slew the Dragon.  Good thing that Huggins is too drunk to argue.

But there is yet another problem...Princess Gloria has been assigned to a marriage.  Rather than marry someone other than her beloved Terry, Gloria concocts a kidnapping from which Terry will rescue her.

But there is yet another problem...Gloria is kidnapped for real and Terry finds himself partnered with Gloria's chosen fiance.

It's going to be a long adventure for all involved.

The best - and only - descriptive word that came to my mind while reading John Moore's A Fate Worse Than Dragons was cute.  Other words that I could use would be light, frothy, and funny.  The book was so funny that it made me laugh out loud often enough to draw a "You sure are laughing a lot when you read that" comment from my girlfriend.

But does that make the book good, or at least good enough for me to recommend it?  Well, yes and no.  If Monty Python and the Holy Grail or The Princess Bride are your kind of funny (and my gut instinct tells me that most regular visitors to this blog are) then the novel will be the kind of weekend reading you'll want when you're in the mood for something light, frothy, and fun.  If it isn't, then just walk away.  There is nothing for you here.  Believe me.

The characters are uniformly likable and easy to relate to, even the evil ones.  The jokes range from broad to subtle.  My personal preference leans towards to the subtle jokes and the almost Woody Allen style banter between the various heroes and heroines as they bungle and regroup after each humorous misadventure.

I don't know if John Moore routinely revisits these particular characters and the mythical land of the Twenty Kingdoms, but I will definitely be cracking open a few more of his books to find out.

Shock II - by Richard Matheson

Thirteen tales of the fantastic, the frightening, and the wondrous by one of science-fiction, fantasy and horror's true Grand Masters.

A Flourish of Strumpets: With everyone else selling things door-to-door, it was bound to happen that prostitutes would attempt to do the very same thing.

Brother to the Machine: A tormented soul attempts to escape from the seemingly inescapable nightmare that is our war torn and space faring future.

No Such Thing As A Vampire: Although vampires do not exist, one appears to be killing Dr. Petre Gheria's wife.

Descent: The bomb is going to be dropped, so America moves underground.

Deadline: A doctor visits a most unusual patient.  A man dying of old age who claims to be only one year old.

The Man Who Made the World: Doctor Janishefsky has a most interesting visitor, a man who claims to have made the world five days ago.

Graveyard Shift: A woman's brutal murder uncovers a monstrous secret.

The Likeness of Julie: Eddy Foster had never noticed the girl in his English class until...

Lazarus II: A domineering mother refuses to allow her son's suicide to keep her from him.

Big Surprise: Mr. Hawkins tells the neighborhood children, "Dig a hole and find a big surprise."

Crickets: Ever wonder what crickets are actually saying?  One man learns the terrifying answer to that question.

Mute: Paal was raised to speak with his mind, not his mouth.

From Shadowed Places: An anthropologist consents to perform a ritual that will lift a juju curse that is killing a young man.

Those inclined to read a blog such as this really do not need to have Richard Matheson introduced to them.  Anyone that grew up during the 50s, 60s, or 70s (and thanks to the miracle of UHF syndicated reruns during the latter, you could experience them all in a single decade) is already familiar with his impressive body of work, if not his name.  But just to give a roll call of his contributions to the above mentioned genres, his novels include The Incredible Shrinking Man (which Matheson also adapted for the big screen), I Am Legend (which has been adapted for the big screen three times, as The Last Man On Earth, with Vincent Price, The Omega Man, with Charlton Heston, and I Am Legend, with Will Smith, and that George A. Romero admitted ripping off for Night of the Living Dead), Hell House (which Matheson, again, adapted for the big screen, as The Legend of Hell House), Somewhere In Time, What Dreams May Come, and A Stir of Echoes.

If that were not enough, Matheson has also written numerous short stories that have been adapted (by himself and others) into classic episodes of The Twilight Zone, classic TV movies such as Trilogy of Terror and Duel, and the not so classic Masters of Horror episode Dance of the Dead (based on the short story of the same name).  He also wrote the screenplays for The Night Stalker and The Night Strangler.

The man is hardcore, and so is this anthology.  There isn't a clunker in the bunch.  All of them are terrific - albeit somewhat dated, times have certainly changed for the better since the 1950s - science-fiction, fantasy and horror stories.  Several of them will be easily recognizable as the source material for memorable, if not outright classic, episodes of genre television.  The Likeness of Julie, with a little narrative tweaking, became a segment in Trilogy of Terror, Big Surprise became a goose-flesh inducing "Gotcha!" vignette for Night Gallery, and Mute, again, with a little tweaking, became one of the better hour long episodes of The Twilight Zone.

While I enjoyed reading those classic stories in their original form, always a good thing to do, my picks for favorite stories are Brother to the Machine, Descent, and Graveyard Shift, which featured a nightmarish image that made my skin crawl.  The comedy opener, A Flourish of Strumpets, gets an honorable mention.

No genre fan should require encouraging to read Richard Matheson.  But if you haven't, then this anthology, or any of the books listed above, are an excellent place to start doing so.

Stephen Romano's Shock Festival

One hundred and one of the strangest, sleaziest, and most outrageous movies you have never seen.

And that you will never see, because those one hundred and one movies, and the cast of nutball actors, directors, producers, and writers that created them, do not exist.  Stephen Romano's Shock Festival is a hilarious and heart warming (for the exploitation movie loving geek, that is) history that never was, but very well could have been.  It's kind of sad, in a way, because I really want to see some of these movies, no matter how bad some of them are supposed to be.

And believe me, these movies could be really, really bad.

Whatever whacked out genre of 70s/80s grindhouse exploitation cinema you might love, or just remember seeing the advertisements for in the local paper, or theater, or television station, you will find it recreated in loving detail on the pages of this too good to be true book.  From sexploitation to blaxploitation, space opera to alien invasion, zombies, ghosts, and monsters to animals run amok, and rogue cops/vigilantes to plain old psychos on the loose.  It's all here in gritty and good natured detail.

Romano and his crew of artists and friends (more on them in a moment) have created a series of jaw droppingly accurate theatrical one sheets, lobby cards, production stills, and even soundtrack albums and movie novelizations to illustrate the insane mock history Romano narrates.  That many of the films, their adverts, and the people that made them are clearly parodies and/or homages of real life films and people only makes the jokes funnier to the knowledgeable fan.  Darby Silver is a parody of Dario Argento, Chuck Music of Charles Band, etc.  Just a few of the joke movies that I was able to see the inspiration for (no doubt intentionally) peeking through the curtain of falsehood: Dead Bugs On the Carpet (Four Flies on Grey Velvet), The Amazing Mutating Freak (The Incredible Melting Man, and I remember seeing and wanting to get that make-up kit), The Ghost of the Raven (The Spectre of Edgar Allan Poe), Mangled (Grizzly), and Starfire Beyond the Galaxy (Star Crash, the experience of writing a book about the production of that film, of having stories he could not tell, inspired Romano to write Shock Festival, all the more reason to love Luigi Cozzi's intoxicatingly silly Spaghetti Space Opera).

If that weren't enough, and it is, the artwork alone is worth far more than its cover price is asking, some of Romano's celebrity friends (I didn't forget about them) join in on the fun.  Allowing their likenesses to be used to create some of the characters in Romano's Alternate Cinema History, actors Ashley Laurence (Hellraiser, Hellbound: Hellraiser 2) and Thomas Jane (Deep Blue Sea, The Punisher, and The Mist) "appear" as sex kitten Natalya Ustinov and Euro-Action star Elliot Swan, respectively.  My geek eye also spotted author Jack Ketchum and the aforementioned Luigi Cozzi in one or two of the hundreds of photos sprinkled between the countless bogus one sheets.  My only disappointments with Shock Festival were that I could not be a part of the fun and that the book, like the era it so fondly mocks, had to come to an end.

Slapstick - by Kurt Vonnegut

In the Green Death ravaged ruins of what was once Manhattan, Dr. Wilbur Daffodil-11 Swain, former pediatrician and the last President of the United States, pens his autobiography on Continental Driving School stationery.

Hi ho.

It's hard to believe that Kurt Vonnegut has finally moved on to the Turkey Farm, but he has and he is sorely missed.  Both by myself and countless others that have enjoyed his unique and hilarious melancholy laden stories.

So it goes.

Slapstick is one of those books that is difficult for me to review, because it reveals just how limited I am in my critical abilities.  It's smarter than I am by a sizable margin.  Reading Vonnegut is an experience that is hard for me to explain or describe.  He grips my heart and squeezes it to the point of inducing pain, all the while tickling my funny bone with razor sharp jokes that perfectly illustrate how life is just a series of mistakes that takes one by surprise.  "History is merely a list of surprises," Swain says at one point.  "It can only prepare us to be surprised again."  The surprise in Vonnegut's narrative world view is that no one (save for the central character) ever notices that life is just series of mishaps.

Hi ho.

The humor in Vonnegut's novel(s) is the reader's protective barrier against the pain that lives in the center of the story.  If that barrier were ever removed, then the story would become far too painful to endure.  This is wonderfully illustrated when Wilbur and Eliza, having lived a dreamlike life of joyous isolation and telepathic genius, make the mistake of thinking that revealing their true nature to their clueless parents and guardians will make things better for everyone.

It doesn't.

So it goes.

And perhaps  it was that very mistake, one that ended their own perfect world, that would lead to the very end of humankind.  Wilbur and Eliza are Adam and Eve, their isolated mansion is their Garden of Eden, and their eventual decision to reveal their genius is the fall that casts them out of their Garden and into a harsh and uncaring world.  One that they are ill-equipped to live in, no matter how smart they might be when allowed to join together in the almost incestuous love of their telepathic genius.

The sub-title for Slapstick is Lonesome No More!  I am fairly certain that all of Wilbur's actions, up to and including the creation of an artificial mass family for all Americans, are rooted in the loss of his sister and desire to return to the state of ignorant grace that was their childhood.  But what is done cannot ever be undone, and the comedic tragedy that is life must to play out in all its chaotic goofiness, one mistake after another.

So it goes.

Vonnegut is gone, off to an eternity at the Turkey Farm.  But his books remain for us to read and enjoy, and they are every bit as vibrant and relevant today as when they were written oh so many years ago.  So go read one.  Just don't be surprised that you weep while you chuckle.  That was the sad and funny genius of the late, great Kurt Vonnegut.

Hi ho.

Teddy Bear Cannibal Massacre - Edited by Tim Lieder

Eleven tales of fear, obsession, and killer clowns.  (According to the title page, that is.)

On its web page Dybbuk Press states that its intended goal is to publish "strange and innovative" fiction, with emphasis placed on horror (that'd be the "strange" side, I'd wager) and experimental writing (being the "innovative" side, naturally).  Dybbuk's premiere effort is an anthology entitled Teddy Bear Cannibal Massacre and while the stories collected within are certainly strange (and entertaining, for the most part), they are also far from innovative.

In a previous review I commented about my issue with reading theme anthologies.  How reading one short story after another about the same subject gets old to me, and fast.  Oddly enough, I had the opposite problem with Teddy Bear Cannibal Massacre, because the anthology is a collection of short stories put together with no editorial comment whatsoever, not even contributors bios.  This made the book a somewhat uneven read at first, because I could not understand what kind of anthology it was I was reading.  Horror?  Humor?  Both?  Neither?  I wish editor Tim Lieder would have given me some sort of clue as to what to expect in an introduction, at least.

But what about the stories?  They are the usual mix of classics and clunkers.  On the classic side, there are Cameron Hill's Hermetic Crab (about a novice magician and his hermit crab familiar), Rob Steussi's Head Drippers (a sane man's intellectual exercise at an asylum leads to an insane discovery about the place), and Michael Stone's Clob (wherein a shy man's "imaginary friend" gives some much needed assist in the girl meeting department).  All three are more than worth the price of book.  The clunkers are C.C. Parker's Formaldehyde (a hodgepodge of slackers, murder and corpse play), Trina Shealy Orton's Brilliant Suspension (an anonymous character undergoes a magical, albeit torturous, transformation) and Rats, Wrong Alley by Tim Johnson (mutant guess whats).  These three stories, while not "bad," really needed to spend a little more time cooking in the idea oven.  The middle range stories are Paul Haines Doof Doof Doof (one of those post-modern twists on the Fairy Tale characters we grew up reading about), Roberta Rogow's Peppercorn Rent (a playful yarn about a strange rental agreement and a young woman's rather animalistic monthly visitor), Brian Rosenberger's Something Funny Is Going On (the killer you know what story), and William Brock's Berries Under Snow (a somber examination of frustrated and/or spurned love - and a perfect closer for the anthology).  Jenifer Jourdanne's modestly amusing non-fiction ramblings, Blue Elephants, is the only writing that does not have some sort of connection to horror, science-fiction or fantasy and, while reading it, I could only wonder what the hell it was doing in this anthology, because it doesn't belong.

Teddy Bear Cannibal Massacre gets Dybbuk Press off to a somewhat promising start.  Each of the contributing writers shows promise and I'm pretty sure, if they stick to it, their work will start showing up in more widely distributed magazines and anthologies.  If they already have, then clearly I need to diversify my reading.  I'm missing some good stuff.