Chadzilla ROARS!!! (The Official Blog of Chadwick H. Saxelid, Writer)

R.I.P. Michael Crichton, 66

Michael Crichton, the author of best-selling novels (The Andromeda Strain, Jurassic Park, and others) and writer/director of hit and/or cult classic movies (Westworld, The Great Train Robbery, and others), has "died unexpectedly" after a private battle with cancer.  He was 66.

My sincerest condolences to his family during this difficult and painful time.

R.I.P. Arthur C. Clarke, 90

(Johnny) Gruesome

Christopher and I caught a screening of this short film/music video tie-in for Gregory Lamberson's upcoming novel Johnny Gruesome at this year's SiliCon.  Lamberson, who wrote and directed the cult classic horror flick Slime City, directed this little marketing venture as well.  The idea of soundtrack albums for novels is unique, but hardly new.  There was a soundtrack album for L. Ron Hubbard's, ahem, "classic" science-fiction epic Battlefield Earth released in the early 1980s (I remember John Stanley plugging it on KTVU's Creature Features back in the day) and, in the early 1990s, splatterpunk authors John Skipp and Craig Spectre composed a soundtrack album for their gory end-of-the-world novel The Bridge.

As far as Lamberson's approach, I dug the music (and ordered the album from the forthcoming novel's official website) and liked the video, mostly because of my Dirty Old Man lust for Erin "Misty Mundae" Brown, so I'll be purchasing the book when it comes out in an affordable paperback edition.  Until then, I'll enjoy the album and the video.  I hope you do, too.

R.I.P. Charles L. Grant

Mark Justice shares the sad news that famed "Quiet Horror" writer Charles L. Grant has died, after a prolonged illness.

Grant's novels and anthologies were a staple of my reading diet in the 80s, back when I was in High School and University.  His original works were filled with a distinctive atmosphere of Gothic dread, as well as psychologically complex characters and strange plot twists.  Grant always favored series fiction.  He is most famous for writing numerous spooky novels and shorter works set in the fictional town of Oxrun Station.  But he also wrote a cluster of science-fiction novels about the Parric Family, a "Millenium" quartet about the End Times, as well as a series about the paranormal debunking Black Oak Detective Agency.  The Black Oak books were evidently born from the unused ideas for X-Files novels Grant did not get the chance to write.  Grant only produced two X-Files novels, Goblins and Whirlwind, before being replaced by Kevin J. Anderson, who would go on to write three.

Grant's love of series extended to the groundbreaking anthologies he edited, the ten volumes of Shadows and the four anthologies set in the fictional town of Greystone Bay are both fine examples.

He even wrote, under the pseudonym Geoffrey Marsh, the novelization of Hudson Hawk.

Although most of Grant's books are no longer in print, I think these titles are worth seeking out at your local, or online, used book store: Black Oak 4: Hunting Ground, For Fear of the Night, Jackals, The Grave, Something Stirs, The Pet, and The Blood Wind.

The Tower is closer...

Peter David and Marvel Comics have announced today that he will be writing the Stephen King's The Dark Tower comic book series.  Great news, now I'm really looking forward to reading it.

The Toxic Avenger: The Novel

Yes, that's right, The Toxic Avenger : The Novel.  Fangoria reports that Troma is getting into the media novel biz.  Schlock King and "co-author" Lloyd Kaufman promises an epic Toxie tale awash in the studio's over-the-top gore, mayhem and lesbian shenanigans.  (That last part qualifies it as Clueless Observations' Most Anticipated Book of 2006!)

I've only seen the first Toxic Avenger movie, (which was quite enough, thank you) but I'm curious enough about this to order the book.

Moonstone collects Kolchak, again.

Moonstone Books is evidently doing quite well with its series of Kolchak the Night Stalker graphic novels and Kolchak: Tales of the Night Stalker comic books.  Even their prose anthology Kolchak: The Night Stalker Chronicles has gone to a second printing.  Great news for an old school Kolchak fanboy.  (No, I did not see a single episode of the new version and am steadfast in my refusal to do so.)

This week sees the release of another Moonstone Kolchak collection, the trade paperback Kolchak The Night Stalker: Terror Within.  Terror Within reprints a trio of graphic novels: Devil in the Details, Pain Most Human (my vote as the high water mark of Moonstone's Kolchak stories), and Pain Without Tears (a solid and, more important, intelligent follow up to Most Human).

But it doesn't stop there!  Summer of 2006 will see Moonstone release an omnibus edition entitled Bare Bones.  But Bones will be far from bare, between its covers will be Kolchak: Tales of the Night Stalker #1-7 (basically the entire run to date), the graphic novels The Get of Belial, Lambs to the Slaughter, and Eve of Terror (Belial and Eve are adaptations of unproduced scripts for the second season of Kolchak: The Night Stalker that never was).  If that wasn't enough, (and for someone who has been collecting the books since day one, it really isn't) there will be author notes, new illustrations and a new Kolchak story.  Now that is something to get excited about.

When can I order it?

Adrienne Barbeau now has a novel idea.

Chuck Norris, William Shatner, Richard Hatch, and Adrienne Barbeau.  What do they have in common?

They are all actors who have written (or have had written for them) novels.

Now that her autobiography There Are Worse Things I Could Do is finished and hitting bookshelves everywhere this March, actress Adrienne Barbeau is turning to the fiction section.  Well, sort of...

Barbeau told Fangoria:

"I have a co-author, because I don't think I'm a person who can create a story; I can tell it once I have the bones of it.  I can make the characters and the dialogue and the scenes, but to come up with a story idea is not a talent I possess."

In other words, Barbeau's name will be on the cover, but the book (which will be a vampire novel) will actually be written by one Michael Scott.  Ghostwritten or not, I'll probably buy it.  I'm only a few years past the "18 to 34 year old" fan base the novel will be aimed at pleasing.  I just wish it was something other than vampires.  I'm more of a rotted ghost, Muck Man, and/or Monster-in-a-Box kind of guy.

R.I.P. Peter Benchley, 65

I have just been forwarded the sad news that Peter Benchley, author of Jaws and other seabound thrillers, has passed away at the age of 65.  The cause of death was idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis, a progressive and fatal scarring of the lungs.

Stephen King talks about the genesis of Cell.

I'm fascinated by behind the scenes stuff, be it movies or how writer's live and work.  Novelist Stephen King has a twenty-four minute podcast on how his novel Cell came about, as well as his thoughts about "useless" technology and being dropped in the Horror Ghetto.  Here is a direct link, here is the page that contains the direct link.  It's a fascinating look at how "America's Bogeyman" gives birth to a novel.

My favorite quote?

"You give a person a cell phone and ten minutes later they're down loading porn.  Twenty minutes later someone's going to tap it."

Quite true.

B-Queen pens an autobiography.

Adrienne Barbeau, former Mrs. John Carpenter, love of my teen-aged life, and star of The Fog, Escape from New York, and Creepshow (to name just a few), has penned an autobiography.

There Are Worse Things I Could Do has immediately jumped to the top of my Must Read Books of 2006 list.  I'm sure that it will look wonderful snuggled up against my copy of If Chins Could Kill : Confessions of a B Movie Actor, by Bruce Campbell.

Fangoria reports that the actress/author will be making an appearance at Dark Delicacies to sign the book on May 10th.  Of course, that is far from the beaten path that I tread.  Hopefully she will be making personal appearances up north.

Cell excerpt.

Entertainment Weekly has an online excerpt of the opening chapter of Stephen King's upcoming novel, Cell.  A strange EMP that surges through the cell phones of the world turns all that use them into violent killing machines, or something to that effect.  Now click on that link and enjoy a taste of the mayhem that will be hitting streets on January 24th.

R.I.P. J.N. (Jerry) Williamson

This morning I found out that J.N. Williamson died.  For people like me who came of age devouring horror novels in the late seventies and early eighties, Williamson's name is as familiar as Stephen King, Peter Straub, Charles L. Grant, and Ramsey Campbell.  (Not to mention Dean Koontz and James Herbert.)  You could not walk through a Walden or B. Dalton Bookseller without stumbling over one of Williamson's gleefully pulp styled horror novels, usually printed by either Zebra or Leisure Books.  Playmates, Premonition, The Tulpa, Death School, Death Angel, Brotherkind, and The Ritual are just a few of the numerous books he wrote that I can remember off the top of my head.  He was one of those writers that made reading horror addictive and fun, he will be missed. 

Here's a link to Gary Braunbeck's touching farewell to J.N. Williamson.

A new Aliens book, and much more, coming from Dark Horse.

I was completely unaware that Dark Horse Comics had started its own Mass Market Paperback imprint.  But one look at its list of upcoming titles has me anxious to read them.  While there are the to be expected novels based on long time Dark Horse titles such as Aliens and Predator, there will also be books based on the Universal Monster classics Creature from the Black Lagoon and The Wolf Man, and even a Scarface prequel!  Dark Horse Press has even jumped on the King Kong bandwagon (which isn't all that surprising), publishing an official sequel to the original 1933 film.  Michael Jan Friedman's book Aliens : Original Sin is available now, making it the perfect stocking stuffer for the Aliens loving relative in your family.

I'll be cracking open my copy of Aliens : Original Sin as soon as the Christmas reading is cleared off of my nightstand.  As if I didn't have enough reading to get caught up on, now there's this stuff to add to the growing pile.

Norris, Western Author.

Now that Chuck Norris is too old for the kick ass action movie stuff, he seems to have turned to writing books.  Or at least allowing the use of his name and likeness to appear on them.  The former movie-turned-TV-star is staying pretty close to his Walker, Texas Ranger cowboy persona, offering up a western entitled The Justice Riders.

From the gold and silver mines of California and Nevada to the wide open plains of Texas, the American West was a wild frontier in the 1870s where dangerous outlaws pursued devilish dreams of fortune.  But there were other men of simple faith, unsung Civil War heroes who adventured west to bring justice to places that had none.  Those they called "The Justice Riders."

Okay, "devilish dreams of fortune" versus "men of simple faith?"  Smells like Christian Fiction to me, and did the book really need four writers?  One of those co-authors is Chuck's brother Aaron, who directed Missing in Action 3 and just about every movie Chuck made afterward.  I think it's obvious that Ken Abraham and Tim Grayem are ghost writing for the Norris boys.

Eh, who cares.  It's Chuck Norris for chrissakes, literally!  (I got a million of 'em folks, and they all stink just as bad as that one.  So get used to it.)  I've been a fan of Chuck's since Good Guys Wear Black, so reading The Justice Riders is a given for me.

Yes, I will review it.

Sigh long with relief.

Peter David is going to write a novel based on the new Battlestar Galactica!

So it's definite, I'll be doing a "Battlestar Galactica" novel (I say it's definite because I got the contract in the mail.)

I figure I must be on the right beam because two of the story elements I wanted to explore were nixed by the BG folks on the basis that it's stuff they're planning to explore in season 3.

Being a fan of both PAD and of the new and greatly improved Battlestar, this is just terrific news.  I can't wait to read it.

Link: PeterDavid.net.

I'm going to die!

Diagnosis Murder tie-in writer and TV producer Lee Goldberg, who is also an admirer of my reviews, has asked my permission to use my name for a victim in book #7 of the Diagnosis Murder series.  Of course I gave it, what fan wouldn't want their murder solved by Doc Sloan?