R. J. Crowther Jr.

Here are a few half-remembered, little seen, and/or cult horror movies, for those of you looking for alternatives to Saw to the Nth power and the remake/prequel onslaught:

"The Last Man on Earth" with Vincent Price. IMHO, one of Price's greatest performances, based on I Am Legend by Richard Matheson, and the most faithful adaptation of the classic novel.

"Angel Heart" with Mickey Rourke--A hallucinatory, horrific, faustian tale, which turns New Orleans into a film noir abbatoir.

"Infection"--directed by Masa Yuki Ochiai. Stylish, gruesome body horror, with viral vectors and supernatural overtones, and a wonderful use of color codes to define divergent realities. Hint--the apple doesn't fall far from the tree.

"Evil To Kako"-- Zombie apocalypse, served up as a low-budget Greek survival story.

"Truth about Demons" Karl Urban realizes he's marked as a human sacrifice in a cat-and-mouse tale where the Devil wants his due.

"Book of Blood" -- The most recent Clive Barker adaption, filmed in Glasgow, well-acted, visually arresting, gothic horror story that gets under your skin. This isn't your mother's Poltergeist.

"Trailer Park of Terror"--White Trash Zombies, with all the gruesome humor and horror that made me fall in love with the Evil Dead trilogy.

"Sangre Eterna" or Eternal Blood--Chilean horror film where vampire roll-players lose their grip on the dice cup of reality.

"Opera" by Dario Argento. He's hardly an unfamiliar name, but Argento's less-seen take on a cursed production of Macbeth is a beautiful, baroque nightmare. If you can't keep your eyes on the screen, there are ways to keep them open--terrible ways. Some of the most disturbing images ever put on celluloid, like Francis Bacon paintings come to life.

"Necronomicon"--Hard to find Lovecraft anthology adaptation by Stuart Gordon. The winner here is David Warner in "Cool Air" and Jeffrey Combs playing Lovecraft.

"The Black Cat" by Stuart Gordon. Moving, award-worthy biopic, starring Jeffrey Combs, playing Edgar Allan Poe. Part of the Masters of Horror series. A fitting tribute for Poe's 200-year anniversary.

"Splinter"--The best horror movie that didn't get wide release this year. It's a ferocious, break-neck paced tale of body horror, where a parasitic organism infects victims tissue and manifests as, well, splinters. The spiny, colonial organism is attracted to heat, and has been dormant in woodland mammals for centuries. Now it's found human hosts, and the images of the infected moving like broken marionettes is guaranteeded to turn over your cringe-o-nomitor. The bastard child of Cronenberg and George Romero.

Remembering H.P. Lovecraft, the father of modern horror, born August 20th, 1890.

May the glowing eyes of the cats of Ulthar light your way.

"I have harnessed the shadows that stride from world to world to sow death and madness."

--H.P. Lovecraft, "From Beyond"

"Searchers after horror haunt strange, far places."

--H.P. Lovecraft, "The Picture in the House"


Image, "Mr. Lovecraft," photo montage by J.K. Potter, copyright 1979.

Another year had passed and the mortal coil loosens, its curves wider and less restrained .   I'm glad to say goodbye to the revolution past, surely the most cruel of my life, with the loss of my father a month ago, of my cat Brown Jenkins at all of thirteen years, and a nasty car wreck that now seems like ancient history.  All these events were powerful reminders of my mortality, and I ache to feel young again, to not hear the tick of the pendulum like the ever-present clock in Edgar Allan Poe's "The Masque of Red Death."

But I have dreams to carry me forward, so many loved ones, and for those things I am forever grateful.  Ahead of me I have another year to hone my craft of writing.   My number one wish for this year--that I'll finally finish the rewrite of Crucifer and turn in a manuscript that I can be proud of, not to mention make my agent gasp with delight, as opposed to cough up a hairball.   My first act of the new natal year was to recommit myself to my writing, with a certain knowledge that each day I squander, is a day that makes my art less likely to see fruition.   I don't want to go to the grave with a computer full of unpublished and unpublishable dregs.  Only the heavens know the measure of my days, and the time to focus is now.  The inkwell of my soul needs draining.

Thirty years ago, on May 25th, Ridley Scott's ALIEN redefined horror and SF, by creating an astonishing hybrid of the two.  It's tagline was, "In Space, no one can hear you scream," but the screams still echo through the spaces between the stars.  My favorite horror film of all time, it was my first experience with sublime horror.  The beauty, the grotesqueness, and the terror transfixed me.  The alien ship with it's biomechanical bridge was so bizarre, and yet so real it punched a hole in my psyche.  I remember praying the beautiful, tough, Ripley would survive, while waiting, white-knuckled, for every transcendent encounter with the xenomorph.  It was also my first encounter with the nightmarish, erotic imagination of H.R. Giger, and my love affair with his art continues to this day.

I was only twelve the first time I saw Alien, all alone, late at night, while it played on HBO, and for weeks I peered at the stars and shivered.  I had heard of many miracles of light in Sunday school--now I  knew there were dark miracles too.  It was only later that I appreciated the film's claustrophobia, its sexual overtones, the phallic horror and subversive pregnancy motif.  I imagine it makes women particularly queasy, even as one of their own conquers the phallus with teeth.  But did it ever make them think twice about pregnancy--about that little life-form kicking inside them, feeding off their blood through a slimy umbilicus?  Did it make men squirm at the thought of being raped?  Worse, the rapist had acid blood; exhaust pipes fed it's lungs--the monster was dark technology incarnate.  With its dripping, projectile mouth, the penetration and invasion--what could possibly be more horrific?  Oh, yes, there's always incubation.

On it's 25th anniversary, I experienced Alien as it was meant to be seen--a pristine, restored print in a darkened theater.  The shock and awe left me trembling and grinning like a madman.  So here's to Ridley Scott for giving us Alien, and to Giger's Oscar-winning vision as its art director. 

Happy 30th Birthday, Alien.















Alien images copyright 20th Century Fox, 1979, 2003.

Yesterday, May 13^th, after a long battle with terminal brain cancer, my father, Bob Crowther, Sr., passed away. It’s so hard for me to accept that my dad is gone, that I’ll never see him holding my mom, playing with his dogs, or hunkered over a book with a purring cat on his lap, picking tomatoes and squash from his garden, or hug him again.

The last few months, especially the last couple weeks, were almost unbearable, but I'm feeling some peace knowing his suffering is over.  Still, I miss him terribly--I love him so much.  He believed in me even when I lost faith in myself. Before he died, he told me, “Never give up on your writing. You’ll only be a failure in my eyes if you give up on your dream.” Just writing those words--the tears come again.

Our family meant more to him than life itself, and my mother was always his “Princess.” Even after 43 year of marriage, I could still drive up to their house in Alpine and find him walking with my mother through the wildflowers and red-barked Manzanita, holding hands like newlyweds. If it wasn't for him, I'd never have appreciated that the natural world is a web of miracles. He loved nature, had a degree in marine biology, and was a class away from completing a second in botany. He survived the horrors of the Vietnam war, and returned to protest it, and was a man of peace with a passion for books from science texts to thrillers.

I’ve spent the last two days with my family, and the sadness is balmed by the relief that my dad has been released.  My companion, D., has been there for me, offering love and comfort, and has lost a friend and the closest thing to a father he ever knew.  I struggle to comfort my sister, who is near inconsolable, and shared a closeness with my dad second only to my mom’s. He was my sister's best friend, her hero, her Dad.  My sister, her partner, Cheryl, and I were rotating helping care for him at home, and doing what we could to help my mom and support her, but the great and terrible bulk of the burden fell on my mother's shoulders.  Morning and night, day after day, she loved and cared for him, barely sleeping and allowing him to pass from this world with dignity.

My dad's greatest fear was that he would lose his mind, and second that he would not be able to control his body.  Near the end, both those horrors became real for him, but he and my mother faced them with incredible courage.  It was like watching a sand castle erode as the tide came in, slowly, relentlessly, until the core dissolved.   Nothing could be more terrible. But he was never alone; was able to be at home, with his Princess, children, and the animals that he loved so much.

When he passed, my mom was sitting at his side, reading him the 23rd Psalm from her worn, heavily underlined Bible. My mother lost the love of her life, but she's at peace now too, and has this calmness and strength that can only be called heroic.  Now my dad is beyond fear, and I believe his soul is happy, near my mom, because for him, that is all the heaven he needs.

I've been locked in self-isolation for months now, wrestling with the twin horns of family tragedy and the slash-and-burn rewrite of Crucifer.   The greatest challenge has been fortifying a psychic wall in my head, so I can work through the former while making progress on the latter.  Most of the time, I feel like that proverbial kid in Holland, who sticks his finger in a hole in a dike to keep back the flood.   But the water leaks around my finger, splashes on my boots, and soaks into the soil of my writing.  I find the scenes which were already becoming more emotional, now are lit with a blue filter of sorrow.   And the city, which more than ever is a major character, has grown more immense, more ominous, a colder God who hears the cries of his children, but won't blot the tears from their eyes.  And the power of trancendent love, the desperate search for meaning, has grown, well, more desperate.

One thing my agent told me she loved when she read the last draft of Crucifer, was the Gothic, Noir atmosphere of the novel.  I had worked hard to build up the shadows and capture the Noir atmosphere, but the city still didn't feel alive.   She knew I've been invovled in the Goth subculture for years, and suggested I expand the Gothic imagery.   I had always intended the the third act to be a radical transition, from future noir to a Gigeresque, Gothic nightmare, but the first two acts were only half-fleshed by comparison.  My agent had the solution,  the old, "write what you know," so I'm pouring my Gothic soul into the book.  Now, there are even a couple scenes set in a futuristic Goth club, built inside a retrofitted church, where genetically modified children of the night dance in the shadow of a crucifix, the marble cross backlit by a green laser nimbus.   I've unleashed my love for the baroque and grotesque, and one word keeps coming back to me--sublime.  I want my would-be readers to touch the sublime, that feeling of awe, wonder and dread, and if they feel it once or twice while reading the book, then my efforts won't be for nothing.  Have you ever knelt in a Gothic cathedral, looked up at the vaulted ceiling soaring overhead, or stood at the edge of a giant cliff, gazing at the waves crashing below?  This is the feeling I am striving to capture.   And love, to feel the transcendent power of love, so real that when it's lost, it rips apart the fabric of your being.

For your amusement, here are a few pictures of me taken at Goth clubs.  "Write what you know?"  More like, "write what you live."  The first was taken on January 31st of this year, at  a Cybergoth event held at Club Sabbat in San Diego.  The second was taken a few years back, outside Bar Sinister in Los Angeles, with my friend, Damon Drew.


Rob at Club Sabbat


Rob and Damon Drew

Happy Birthday, Edgar Allan Poe!

200 years today since the birth of Mr. Poe,  the father of the modern detective story, the modern horror story, and the master of the American Gothic tradition.  Pause and gaze into his eyes--what do you see?  Perhaps you'll find a man of sorrow, acquainted with grief, a genius, haunted not so much by lack of recognition, but by the agonizing loss of wife, Virginia Clemm, who died a year before this famous portrait was taken.   In life and death she was his muse, his sine qua non.  The tragedy and truth of Poe is that our greatest achievements are born out of love, our bright shining moments and epiphanies of horror.    When mortality becomes personal, and the frail cocoon of life is rent before our eyes, only then do we finally glimpse immortality.   Art is a transcription of that revelation.

So today light a candle for Mr. Poe, set aside a few hours and immerse yourself in his words.   Better yet, read them aloud, and listen to each syllable as it flys from your lips, feel the rhythm and hear the sibilance like rustling leaves .  Let the master cast his wordspell upon you.   As a special tribute, here's a link to Vincent Price reading "The Raven."

The dark rises, the veil is thin, and a drum circle of long-dead hearts beats to the rhythm of the Danse Macabre.  Who says Vampires don't exist?  Who wants to live forever?  Blessed Samhain and Happy Halloween!

Zombie Haiku:

The Halloween countdown continues with my pick for the year's best contribution to Halloween humor, aka "The award for most brains consumed in a single evening."  It's a twisted little book called "Zombie Haiku" which is a first person account of a man's rapid degeneration, after he is infected by a zombie.  The descent is told through a chronological series of Haiku (sadly, not always true to form), but I laughed until my guts fell out and snorted my maggoty brains across the pages.   While I'm on the subject, here's a bit of zombie trivia--the pop-culture notion that zombies crave human brains, as opposed to hungering for human flesh in general, didn't become part of zombie lore until it appeared in the 1985 movie, "Return of the Living Dead," written by Dan O'Bannon--yes, the same O'Bannon who wrote Ridley Scott's "Alien."    Brain-craving, as zombie fans know,  is not part of Romero's undead canon.  The brilliant zombie books of Brian Keene and Max Brooks have gone back to the earlier concept of humanity as a shrieking smorgasbord.

Here's a few choice cuts from the "Zombie Haiku" book.  Shamble over to a bookstore and pick up a copy.

ZOMBIE HAIKU
 
(Existential Zombie--a day in the life)
 
Everything I thought
tastes like chicken
really tastes like man.

There is something fun
about that soft popping sound
when biting fat calves.

The other dead guy
stares at me with a blank look
as we softly moan.

I can see his tongue
move through the hole in his face
that isn't his mouth.
 
I know he can't see
because the room is pitch black
and I have his eyes.*
 
  
(The nursing home)
 
My instinct steers me
to my gourmet dinner feast
a nursing home.
 
Little old ladies
speed away in their wheelchairs,
frightened meals-on-wheels.
 

(Homecoming--shudder--so wrong in so many ways!)
 
I remember home
and I remember my mom,
and her meaty thighs.
 
I loved my momma,
I eat her with my mouth closed,
how she would want it.
 
*My personal favorite
 
All Haiku taken from the book, "Zombie Haiku" by Ryan Mecum, copyright 2008

Halloween Countdown:  "Just After Sunset"

As I'm sure many admirerers of Stephen King know,  his new collection of horror stories, "Just after Sunset," arrives in bookstores on November 11th.  Too late for Halloween, you say?  Would you like an early taste of this bitter fruit?  One of the stories--"N."--has been adapted into a multimedia comic book that you can view for free online.  "N." unfolds in twenty-five episodes, with a preface by the master himself.   The episodes were released this summer, presented as a serial (how did I not hear about this earlier?!).  Each episode plays out through comic book-like frames, with characters drifting across the screen, light shifting though the backgrounds, and fantastic voice acting and sound effects.  It's immersive, it's unnerving, and it's a terrifying experience.  In a publishing first, a DVD with the complete animated graphic novel will be included in "Just After Sunset."

N., as King will tell you, was inspired by Arthur Machen's 'The Great God Pan," a masterpiece that heavily influenced Lovecraft.  King also mentions that "N." is intentionally Lovecraftian, with a modern infusion of psychiatry, namely, an exploration of obsessive-compulsive disorder.   This is the horror of reality disintegrating around you, of your frames of reference blurring, of The Other intruding until there is no other.*  Kill your television, turn down the lights, and click--N. is Here. 

*For another brilliant, reality-rending horror story, may I suggest "Details" by China Mievelle, most recently published in his short story collection, "Looking for Jake." 

When my agent offered to represent me, a supernova of new hope went off within me.  Now the firestorm has blown clear, and I'm focused on my blind spots,  those underdeveloped parts of my book that I hadn't noticed.  After a careful reading, my agent asked for a rewrite.  She discovered several problems that I need to address--a character whose motivation isn’t defined enough, another who starts off with a bang then fizzles with wasted potential, and a subplot that never comes full circle--and must come full circle to give a satisfying conclusion, not to mention set up a sequel.

So, why did she take on my manuscript with these flaws?  Why would she waste her time if it needs so much work?  The answer?  She's not wasting her time because she believes in the book, and sees it not only for what it is, but for what it can become.  A good agent helps a writer clean up a promising manuscript,  a great one unleashes it's potential.  The same holds true for an editor.  I'm fortunate that I have an agent with a keen editorial eye, and know her insights will save me from a slew of rejections.  When an agent asks for revisions (which happens more often than not) it’s called “shaping the manuscript for submission,” but it’s less about shaping than reconstructive surgery.  When my agent told me, "You're not there yet," it felt like a size-twelve boot to the groin, but she said she knows I can get there and told me not to despair.

And I'm not despairing, I'm working my ass off.  I want to prove to her and to myself that her faith in me isn’t wasted.  While waiting for her editorial notes, she told me to reread the manuscript, consider the global criticisms, and make notes of my own for an upcoming phone conference.  A funny thing happened when I reread the manuscript.  Several of the characters shouted at me, sharing stories I had never heard.  The detective with wasted potential vented her rage, furious that I hadn’t let her solve a major crime, when she had the tenacity and intelligence to do so.  Another character told me that if I really loved him, I’d have the courage to show how much he loved my lead protagonist, despite the fact that doing so would destroy his sanity.  I know he’s right, but it hurt like hell because I really do love him, and can’t save him from himself, even though I want to.  When I feel my characters’ pain and frustration, I know I’m on the right track.

I’ve bowed to the voices in my head, and I will get there from here.

Wonderful news!

As of today, Colleen Lindsay is my agent!  Some you who are reading this already know her, and will understand why I'm so excited.  Before she took a job at FinePrint Literary Management, Colleen was a publicist for Del Rey/Ballantine, and as many SF, fantasy and horror writers can attest, she was one of the best damn publicists in the book world.  Now she brings all her expertise to representing writers, and I feel so privileged to have her represent me.   One thing that really impresses me is her attitude toward writers--not only does she see the relationships as partnerships, she wants to help her writers build long term careers.  The official announcement won't go up on her blog until next week, but she kindly gave me permission to break the news here.  For great advice and links on writing, publishing and query letters, I invite you to check out her blog.  

Colleen Lindsay--The Swivet

You'll also find plenty of snark, a good amount of silliness, and a cat-filled window into the daily life of an agent.