Results tagged “novel”

I don’t know how to say this delicately, so I’m just going to come straight out with it… Joe Schreiber f*&%ing rocks! If you love it when the hairs on your arms stand straight up, if you love it when your heart races from sudden fear as you walk out of a dark room in your own house late at night (you know the feeling!), or if you just love horror in general than you need to pick up his books and read them. I read Chasing the Dead and loved it. Eat the Dark freaked me out so much I stopped reading it at night and had to finish the bloody thing during daylight hours. Star Wars: Death Troopers (yes, it’s two words now) and No Doors, No Windows will both publish this fall. I’ve read the manuscript for Death Troopers and it is every bit as scary, gory, and cool as that cover image leads you to believe it might be.

Joe surprised us with an appearance at New York Comic Con last month and we jumped at the chance to throw him in front of the Suvudu camera and ask him a couple questions.

Part One:

Jump for more with Joe.

The following is an original essay by Richard K. Morgan. I hope you enjoy:

“I tell you, it’s no game serving down in the city”

- Gorbag - forgotten orc captain from Minas Morgul

I’m not much of a Tolkien fan - not since I was about twelve or fourteen anyway (which, it strikes me, is about the right age to read and enjoy his stuff). But it would be a foolish writer in the fantasy field who failed to acknowledge the man’s overwhelming significance in the canon. And it would be a poor and superficial reader of Tolkien who failed to acknowledge that in amongst all the overwrought prose, the nauseous paeans to class-bound rural England, and the endless bloody elven singing that infests The Lord of the Rings, you can sometimes discern the traces of a bleak underlying human landscape which is completely at odds with the epic fantasy narrative for which the book is better known.

That little twist of urban angst quoted above is one such trace. It comes at the end of The Two Towers and is part of an on-going set of dialogues between two orc captains at the tower of Cirith Ungol. And for a while - until Tolkien remembers these are Bad Guys and sends the wearyingly Good and Wholesome Sam up against them - we get a fascinating insight into life for the rank and file in Mordor. The orcs are disenchanted, poorly informed and constantly stressed by the uncertainties that lack of information brings. They suspect that the war might be going badly for their side, and that their commanders, far from being infallible, seem to be making some serious errors of judgment. They worry that if their side loses, they can expect scant mercy from their victorious enemies. They mutter their misgivings sotto voce because they know that there are informers in the ranks and a culture of enforcement through terror bearing down from above. They also seem possessed of a rough good humour and some significant loyalty to the soldiers they command. And they’re not enjoying the war any more than Frodo or Samwise; they want it to be over just as much as anybody else.

So, if you’re living stateside (or even if you’re not, most likely), then you know that today we the people of the United States of America will swear in a new President. It’s an incredible time of hope and dreaming and kitschy capitalism. All joking aside, it’s a crazy tough job that involves decisions that, no matter which way you go, many people will believe you are wrong. Combine that with the current situations that President-elect Obama (or President Obama, depending on when you read this) is stepping into, and you almost feel sorry for the guy.

But while his job will be hard enough it could be worse. This could be a SciFi story.

SciFi stories rarely go well for Presidents. Consider the most recent movie adaptation of The Manchurian Candidate. The President has a brainwashed VP that is putting him in harm’s way. Bill Pullman’s turn as President in 1996’s Independence Day has him making a big rallying speech and doing some cool fighter pilot Commander-in-Chief machismo, but in the process the White House gets just a little blown up…along with a few other cities^*. Jack Nicholson also portrayed a President under alien invasion in Mars Attacks. And while Nicholson’s President Blake had the “cuter” aliens, they were no less menacing. Er…kinda.

My entire adult career has, in various forms, dealt with selling or promoting horror books. So at parties, or on dates, it invariably comes up what I do for a living, and the response is all-too-often “I could never read horror. Who would read that kind of crap?” To borrow a phrase from Family Guy, it really grinds my gears. There is a persistent stereotype of horror fiction — the idea that it’s nothing more than reading a novel of mindless “Friday the 13th”-ish slaughters.

The trick is showing these folks that horror fiction, like horror movies, can cover a massive range of styles, emotions, and themes. And once they realize that horror fiction doesn’t have to mean (although it can mean) supernatural, or buckets of blood, or zombies, they often see that they’ve not quite understood what horror fiction is. So how to do it? Most avid readers will have read at least one of the following titles. And many readers of these books have loved them. So find a title they’ve loved that they hadn’t identified in their heads as horror. I’ve selected a range of incredibly popular titles here not often thought of as “horror novels” that will cover various age ranges, so you should be covered regardless of the demographic you’re aiming to educate. And if there’s any books on this list that you haven’t read — do yourself a favor and dig in. You won’t be sorry.

The Other by Thomas Tryon (1971)

Sadly, this masterpiece has been out of print for nearly two decades, but is thankfully back in a gorgeous new edition from Millipede Press. While younger readers may not be familiar with it, anyone who was reading fiction in 1971 had a copy of this book. The language is stunningly gorgeous, which just makes the terrifying revelations in the book that much more shocking. Millions and millions of readers devoured this book and would never think of themselves as horror book readers — and yet The Other remains one of the most brilliant horror novels of all time.

More books to convert horror-haters after the jump…

What is most likely going to be the best horror film of 2008 — and one of the best films of the year, period — is getting a limited release in theaters starting today.

And it’s not Saw V.

While there’s still 2 months left in 2008, it’s damn hard to imagine any film coming out is going to top the sheer brilliance of “Let the Right One In,” a Swedish film based on the Swedish bestseller of the same name by John Ajvide Lindqvist (just released here in the U.S. in a translated edition).

This is one you can’t miss.

[More after the jump, including the trailer….]