Odonis Odonis - Shadow Play

 

It's been a minute since I've kept up with Odonis Odonis. Back in 2016, their album Post Plague was a constant in my ears and on my turntable, however, the band's subsequent releases, while good, didn't quite live up to the same high regard I'd assigned them after what I still feel not only sums up a small era of my life but is one of my favorite records of that decade. So I guess that disconnect explains why I totally missed the fact that they dropped a new record back in October, and what's more, it's FANTASTIC. Special thanks - as always - to Heaven Is An Incubator for posting a track from this and alerting me to it. If you dig, you can order one of the thirteen remaining copies (fourteen until I ordered mine) of Spectrums over on their Bandcamp or from the always marvelous Felte Records.

It goes without saying I'd developed an affinity for this particular song, as it shares a title with the series of novels I've been working on for several years now. 

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Time Machine GO!!! 1991:

In this past Wednesday's NCBD section, I casually mentioned an idea that kind of occurred to me on the spot but didn't really sink in as to what a profound self-insight I'd inadvertently made, the idea that my reversion to a fairly rabid Marvel Zombie/comic collector had more to do with a return to the things that had made the tumultuous task of navigating adolescent as an unconscious way to deal with the equally rocky navigation of Middle Age. This started with an out-of-the-blue interest in following the last year of Nick Spencer's run on Amazing Spider-Man but has pushed me not only back into following some of the modern X-titles (really, just one and a few mini-series), but a nearly inexplicable longing to rebuy and reread a bunch of the post-Claremont X-men stories, first with 1994's The Phalanx Covenant and now, of all things, the original Onslaught opus.

I want to point out here that these are books that I do not in any way shape or form consider 'good.' Conceptually, perhaps, but writing-wise, not at all. And while Fabien Nicieza had some pretty good chops, when we get into Scott Lobdell territory, well, I just consider that era of X-Men pretty mediocre-to-downright-awful stuff. And yet, here I am, combing the back issue bins at the Comic Bug and reading some of this stuff. And that off-the-cuff comment about reaching back into my past to reconnect with touchstones of my adolescence as a coping mechanism for the Horrors of aging in an era of little compassion and perhaps less tolerance really strikes me now as another instance of how our minds will do what they need to do to cope and survive, even if our personalities are completely unaware of those tragedies. So with that in mind, let me resurrect a moniker from my old Chud days to you about what I'm reading from the past, what I think of it now, and how it holds up.

Okay, granted this 1991's Muir Island Saga is still protected as awesome in my book because it's penned by Chris Claremont, however, it's Claremont's final entry and thus, the gateway to the end of his continuity, or rather the way he approached continuity, so I've always kind of held a grudge against both this series and it's villain, the Shadow King, who for whatever reason, I just could not care less about. That's my 'historical' perspective of this small, four-issue 'saga' that really doesn't feel like a saga at all. A bit short and to the point to be a saga. That said, in this instance, the brevity is good, and unlike the full-blown crossovers and X-Events that began to clog the continuity after the near-perfect triumph of Inferno, Uncanny X-Men 279-280 and X-Factor 69-70 feel like a pretty good story that lines 'em up and knocks 'em down, reworking all the allegiances Claremont had, up to this point, used to divvy up the characters and keep things interesting, paving the way for the 'Blue' and 'Gold' teams that would surface in Jim Lee's X-Men #1 and Uncanny 281, which realigned all the original X-characters like Scott and Jean with the Xavier camp and made X-Factor the new equivalent of Freedom Force, under Valerie Cooper - a character I had completely forgotten about.

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Playlist:

The Neverly Boys - The Dark Side of Everything

Lower Dens - Escape From Evil

TVOTR - Return to Cookie Mountain

The Bronx - The Bronx (IV)

Motörhead - Ace of Spades

Motörhead - Overkill

Converge and Chelsea Wolfe - Bloodmoon: I (pre-release singles)

High on Fire - Electric Messiah

High On Fire - Luminiferous

Odonis Odonis - Spectrums

Drab Majesty - Modern Mirror 

Mastodon - Hushed and Grim

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Card:

A reminder to strike while the iron is hot.

New Zeal and Ardor!

How long do we have to wait until this new Zeal and Ardor album drops? The correct answer is too f*&king long! 

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READ:

This has been a strange year, because over halfway through, and I've read very few actual novels. Instead, all my reading time is spent reading comics. Not a bad thing, and this certainly isn't the first time this has happened, but between starting the A Most Horrible Library podcast, and the brief resurrection of Drinking with Comics, I've fallen back in love with the medium in a way I haven't felt in years, specifically Marvel Comics, which I thought I'd left behind me after the 2015 Secret Wars event tapped us old-timer Marvel Zombies on the shoulders and whispered, "The old continuity you cling to is gone. Rest easy, this is for a younger generation now."

I've been digging in back issue bins for the first time in at least 15 years. I've also been seeking stuff out on eBay, both in attempts to fill in long-forgotten gaps in series I'd thought I'd given up on. It's made me realize I've come to regret giving away or selling back so many comics over the years. And I've been re-reading a bunch of old-school series as I acquire these missing pieces.

I remember seeing a full-page ad for this book back when I was a kid and thinking it looked troubling. A mutant kid killing one of his friends/teammates? Wow. I only read New Mutants here and there as a kid, so a lot of the character development was lost on me when I did pick up the book, and I never quite understood how Fallen Angels fit into the overall continuity of the ongoing Mutant Books, most penned by my beloved Chris Claremont still at that time. Now I know.

Fallen Angels was a New Mutants spin-off mini-series that ran back in 1987. A couple years ago I found issues 5-8 somewhere and picked them up, but it wasn't until two weeks ago I tracked down 1-4, and now completed, I've finally been reading this weird little adventure that features Roberta DaCosta AKA Sunspot and Warlock - always a character that made me go "WTF?" when I was a kid. Like a lot of comics from this era, this is a bit over-written, however, once you adjust to the difference in style, it's pretty fun.

This is a more recent title. A five-issue series by Jason Latour, Robbie Rodriguez and colorist Rico Renzi. Robbie and Rico are the visual team responsible for the short-lived but fantastic Vertigo series FBP, aka Collider. I fell in love with their style on that book, and when they came up with the initial design for Spider-Gwen - a character I shouldn't have really cared about at all at the time based on my reading habits - I gushed. 

I love this character's design. 

At the time of the series, and when it came out, I bought issues 1 and 2 and then stopped. Recently, I found 3-5 in the bins at The Comic Bug and started reading through it. Pretty cool alternate universe set-up, where Peter Parker is dead, Gwen was bitten by the radioactive spider, and Frank Castle is a cop! Also, MJ and Gwen play in a band called, what else? The Mary Janes, and have a hit song called "Face it, Tiger."

I don't know that I'll go back and read anything after this small series, but these five issues are bringing me great joy at the moment, so who knows?

With my recently reestablished love of Spider-Man, I've been going back in and just snatching rando issues from the three 80s series I would read off and on, and which I'm realizing I am missing so many issues I once had. In particular, I've been finding quite a few issues of Peter Parker: The Spectacular Spider-Man, most issues in the 130s and 140s. Here's a recent acquisition that ties together several other disparate issues I had, so I can now read a short little stint. Remember: back in the 80s and before, trade collections were next to non-existent, so the editorial edict for these books wasn't for the creators to do 5-issue arcs. What we'd get is one-offs, larger threads that played out amidst the monthly stand-alones, and, in Spidey's case, arcs that ran across all three of his titles at the time (Web, Spectacular, and of course, Amazing). 

The good news is, almost all of these books run between $2.99 and $3.99, so it's not like I'm breaking the bank. And sifting through the back issue bins has been a strangely calming routine. I can get all stressed out at work, stop by the bug and spend 30 minutes flipping through issues, and all that bad shit is gone when I walk out the door.

Also, motivated by the "Book Club" section on the latest episode of the Marvel's Pull List podcast, I decided it was finally time to re-read Grant Morrison's New X-Men run, so I dusted off the first of my three hardcovers and blew through the first arc E is for Extinction, as well as the 2001 annual that introduced Xorn. Oh, reading this is making me remember just how much I love Morrison's take on the X-Men.

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Playlist:

Anthrax - Among the Living

Dio - Holy Diver

Chicago - 25 or 6 to 4 (single)

Black Sabbath - Paranoid

King Woman - Celestial Blues (pre-release singles)

Jethro Tull - Benefit

Ministry - Animositisomina

Godflesh - New Flesh in Dub Vol 1

Zeal and Ardor - Stranger Fruit

Mastodon - Crack the Skye 

 

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Card:

I'm back on the journey into Shadow Play, Book Two, and for the first time since last year about this time, I am IN! The book is occupying a lot of my thoughts and time, and what's more, I finally found the voice for a new element I'm adding. Also, there is way more written than I thought, and it's way better than I remembered. So while I'm still letting a new nosleep series idea percolate, my main focus has finally shifted back to where I need it to be!

Pre-orders for Murder Virus are Live!

 

Off the top of my head, you know what'd be cool? Some new music from King Woman in 2021. I'll keep checking their Bandcamp and hope for the best.

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Pre-order:

The culmination of eleven months of work is finally official! Murder Virus releases everywhere on March 23rd - one day before my 45th birthday and exactly 374 days after the early morning trip to a barren Trader Joes to wait in line for scraps that convinced me I'd be crazy not to dig out the manuscript for the first successful piece of long-form fiction I ever wrote, dust it off, and re-write it.

2007 - in order to cope with the constant insanity of working retail for the first time in my life - as a manager to boot - I wrote The Secret Life of Murder, a novel about a murder virus that moves through the population, causing people to kill one another in epic scale. The idea was to create a harmless microcosm where I could vent my frustrations with fictionalized violence. It was my first attempt at writing a novel that I actually thought worked, and I always kept it in the back of my mind that I would dust it off one day and re-write it. Well, what better time than during an actual viral pandemic? So that's why the second Shadow Play book was delayed - I literally shifted gears in the middle of writing it to focus on this. 

The title Murder Virus, which I hated at first, worked its way into my brain stem and eventually convinced me to love it, especially after a friend compared it in simplicity and 'high concept' to Fight Club, which also sounds pretty generic until you actually read it. That's my feeling with this one, too. Murder Virus is a lot darker and stranger than I realized while writing it, and the story does not end up anywhere I could have predicted. This makes it my favorite thing I've written to date. I'm extremely proud of this one, and obviously, because of the infusion of mental, physical, and historical elements of the past year, it's special to me and will no doubt always remain so; a time capsule of 2020 and where my head and emotions were while navigating the most difficult year (so far) of my life.

You can pre-order Murder Virus from Barnes and Noble HERE.

You can pre-order Murder Virus from Amazon HERE.

And the pre-order for Murder Virus from Indiebound isn't up yet but should be in a day or two (same with the Barnes and Noble paperback - right now they only have the ebook added to their site).

If you have a brick-n-mortar book store and really want to do me a solid, ask them to order a few copies from Ingram. They'll know how to do it. Oh, and thanks for reading!

Also, as always, that beautiful cover design was my concept executed well above my expectations by Jonathan Grimm. His website is HERE - check it out!

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Playlist:

White Lung - Eponymous

Beth Gibbons, The Polish National Radio Sympony Orchestra & Krzysztof Pernderecki - Henryk Górecki: Symphony No. 3

Danzig - Danzig III: How the Gods Kill

The Besnard Lakes - A Coliseum Complex

Ozzy Osbourne - The Ultimate Sin

The Maine - You Are OK

Windhand - Eternal Return

White Ward - Live Exchange Failure

Nirvana - Bleach

Guns N' Roses - Appetite for Destruction

P.M. Dawn - Set Adrift on Memory Bliss

King Woman - Doubt EP

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Card:

 

Applying this card to the announcement above.

Isolation: Day 107

Full article on Bloody Disgusting, Legion looks like it will be one hell of a ride. I love the visual allusions to Evil Dead, I love the links to Shamanism and Sorcery, and, well, I guess I love everything about this trailer.

**

Playlist:

C-Building Kids - Shitting in the Urinal
Run the Jewels - RTJ4
Bell Witch and Aerial Ruin - Stygian Bough, Vol. 1
Belong - October Language
Psychetect - Extremism
Andy Fosberry - Death Ship 2047

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Channeling the Will to forge new goals. As usual, on the nose with my creative endeavors. The novel is finished, I'm palate cleansing with a short story, and then it's back to Shadow Play.


Speaking of writing, here's a situation I find myself in need of help with.

I'm running a poll on the Horror Amino at the moment, but I'll post my quandary here as well. Any readers who are able to post a reply with their opinion on this matter, it would be much appreciated. That said, I generally do not comment on other sites due to an aversion to elongating my online fingerprint, so I will absolutely understand if no one does.

Here's the deal:

The current title for the new novel is The Secret Life of Murder. I'm having doubts about that name, primarily based on friends' who read this back when it was finished in 2008 and didn't take to the title.

Some background:

This is not the second book in the Shadow Play trilogy, which is completely outlined. And when I say outlined, we're talking detailed to the point that the word count of the outline may very well rival or best the eventual word count on the actual novel. That said, I am refraining from actually writing Book Two until Book Three's outline is complete. Three was about 50% outlined as of February, however, two things made me push both of these back so that Book Two will now release in 2021 and Book Three 2022. Those two things were A) Realizing I would not be able to finish outlining Book Three and write Book Two this year, and B) the onset of COVID-19, Shelter-in-Place, and borderline mass hysteria seemed too in-line with The Secret Life of Murder, which follows a small group of characters trapped in Seattle, Washington as a "Murder Virus" the press has nicknamed MV-3 works its way through the population. MV-3 turns everyone infected into rampaging murder drones, and the resulting wave of chaos appears unstoppable. The virus is introduced into the population by way of a book written by a shadowy ex-hippy guru names Abremlin Harvest.

Being that this one was already finished but has sat for over a decade, the work I set out to do was fairly straight forward: I knew there would be a lot of grammatical/syntax issues I needed to edit,  because, simply put, I am a much better writer now than I was thirteen years ago. I also knew the timeline of events that make up the plot would need to be sharpened, and I wanted to work the emotions, situations, and socio-political elements occurring in our own world into the story, making it more parallel to what we've experienced so far in 2020. This was not difficult to do, although I did end up changing an entire layer of the final act to better reflect the character arc of the Earth, which figures in as a sort of character when you take into account that, much like I believe with COVID-19, the planet is employing the virus as a medicinal reaction to the overpopulation currently choking the life from it. Taking all this into account, I still feel as though The Secret Life of Murder is the best title, however, after living with this one for so long, I'm unsure if I feel that way because it is a good title, or if it just feels that way to me because it has stood as the uncontested 'placeholder' for it in my head for thirteen years.

The question then is, without having read this novel, is The Secret Life of Murder a title that you would scroll past on amazon or - if you're lucky enough to have one - the shelf of an actual book store. Is its not-so-subtle play on all those non-fiction books from the 00s (The Secret Life of Bees, The Secret Life of Lobsters, etc) cause for an eye roll? Or is it intriguing enough to make you want to at the very least read the synopsis?

Me and That Man - Mestwo

There's something to be said for artists who, whether they plan to or not, end up defining a part of our time, whether it's a year, or half-year, or period of weeks and/or months. Me and That Man is having that affect on me now, here at the start of the 20s. Part of it is because I didn't hear about them until the back half of 2019, and part of it is the pace at which they have been releasing singles off their upcoming 2020 album, Same Shit Volume One, due out March 27th on Napalm Records (Pre-order HERE). The steady, every-couple-of-weeks has helped keep them on my mind, in my ears, and a continual OST to these cold and dreary days of the first quarter (LaLa Land's 'cold and dreary' might not be as severe as a lot of other places, but everything is relative). This new track is simple, catchy, and has a certain stoic dirge quality that, once again, shows me Nergal is a huge Nick Cave fan. Not a band thing by any means.

**

The similarities between the procedural CDC elements of Chuck Wendig's novel Wanderers and the current 'outbreak' of the Coronavirus are frightening to say the least. Benji Ray's complex relationship with the job of disease identification/control/treatment already inspired me to pull Terry Gilliam's Twelve Monkeys off the shelf in anticipation of a re-watch, reality and the daily news - which I largely shy away from these days other than BBC - have made me think twice about adding to the 'paranoia fire' that seems to lay at the heart of the modern world at the moment.


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Playlist:

Blut Aus Nord - Memorial Vetusta II: Dialogue with the Stars
Drab Majesty - The Demonstration
Godflesh - Love and Hate in Dub
Godflesh - Songs of Love and Hate
Blut Aus Nord - Hallucinogen
Bohren and Der Club of Gore - Patchouli Blue
Tangerine Dream - Sorcerer OST
Steve Moore - Bliss OST
Night Shop - In the Break
Black Pumas - Eponymous
Iggy Pop - Lust for Life
Revolting Cocks - Big Sexy Land
Mol - Jord

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Card:

A direct reference to the power and stability my recent writing sessions have given my made-up world of Shadow Play. As if to further underline that interpretation, a second card leapt from the pile as I pulled the first off the top of the deck:

Second time this week for XXI The Universe, and why not? I'm currently dealing with massive philosophical concepts, finding fun and interesting ways to instill a version of my own cosmology in this work that is coming to define my life (at least until it's over and I move on).

2019: July 22nd - The Dandy Warhols Used to Be Friends

It's not surprise that once K and I began Veronica Mars (from season 1 because she's never seen it and I haven't seen it in a long time), I'd gravitate back toward The Dandy Warhols. These guys helped define my early 2000s, and although it's not exactly where my head is at the moment, it's great to get back into the mood for these guys in the height of summer. Fits.

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Saturday morning I caught Peter Ricq's horror comedy Dead Shack on Shudder TV. Fun little flick; parts of it irritated me initially, but I've grown a bit fonder of it in hindsight. And it has a fantastic concept. You can check out my brief review on my new Letterboxd account HERE.

Yeah, just what any of us need - more social media. But it's movies... anyway, here's the Dead Shack teaser trailer the director uploaded to his youtube account:



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Sunday, K and I went to the theatre and saw Crawl. Absolutely fantastic, fun flick to see in a theatre. The storm effects are amazing. And there is zero fat on this one - as Anthony from The Horror Vision said in his review, it is a tight 87 minutes that does not mess around.



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Playlist from the last few days:

Black Polygons - Lobélia
Public Image Ltd. - This is What You Want...
Sigur Rós - Variations on Darkness
Aerosmith - Pump
The Soft Moon - Criminal
Zombi - Shape Shift
The Soft Moon - Zeros
Drab Majesty - Moder Mirror

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Card of the day:

A little troublesome; I finished that final read-through/edit on Shadow Play the other night, but advice from a friend in the biz is making me reconsider releasing it myself. This is a highly respected, published horror author who advised me once a book is published, no publisher will touch it, unless, like Hugh Howey, you sell a million copies on your own. I hadn't really considered seeking a publisher that seriously, but it was never out of the question. I find myself reflecting on whether this card is warning of trouble if I do self-publish, or if I don't.

2019: April 7th - Droneflower

Well, I did not expect to be posting this track today. I didn't expect to even think of one of my favorite Guns and Roses songs any time soon. And 'favorite G&R song' is a somewhat exclusive label, as the band long ago irritated me to the point that I have little ability left to engage with their music in any meaningful way. It's all nostalgia, with only brief glimpses of the feelings their music - especially the epics on the two Illusions records - used to inspire in me back when I was in high school and G&R was a force to be reckoned with. It's not that the material is lacking, because songs like Estranged, Coma, and yes, even November Rain still feel epic and genuine to me. But for a band I once thought would be the 'next Rolling Stones,' G&R couldn't keep it together and ended up traveling through this timeline as a not much more than a bad joke. Nadler's upcoming collaborative album with Stephen Brodsky, out April 26th on Sacred Bones, however, is not a joke:



I can't place where I know Marrisa Nadler's name from; it doesn't matter. Between her, Chelsea Wolfe, Emma Ruth Rundle, and Myrkur, there is an amazing cabal of female artists exploring the dark and beautiful intersection of folk and black metal. It's not about sound, it's about tone and aesthetic. And Brodsky's discography is loaded with impressive projects, so I think I'll pre-order this one, which can be done HERE.

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The Horror Vision had a group outing last Thursday and caught the first pre-screening of Kevin Kölsch and Dennis Widmyer's new iteration of the classic Stephen King novel Pet Sematary. I'm sorry to say I hated it. With a passion. And I think I have some pretty good reasons for that hate. Did my Castmates agree with me? Check out our reaction on any of the following platforms below to find out, but only if you've seen the flick; we go heavy spoilers on this one:

The Horror Vision on Apple
The Horror Vision on Spotify
The Horror Vision on Google Play
The Horror Vision Official Website

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I leave for Spokane in a few hours, and in preparing for this trip, my main goal over the last few days has been to finish the First Reader copy of the Shadow Play Book One, so I could pass it off to Missi and NOT THINK ABOUT IT for a few weeks. I'm happy to say I accomplished my goal, even though by the end of the work - last minute touch-ups to the prose and a ton of formatting tweaks that resulted from taking the finished document out of Scrivener and into Vellum, I was spent. I raced through three hours last night and came out the other side feeling as though I'd been immersed in hard physical labor. Now? On to Ciazarn!

Ciazarn: also known as carny, is a private language employed by those who live and work in Carnival culture, meant to keep anyone outside that culture from knowing what is being said.

This is the new collaboration with Jonathan Grimm, who I'm also doing The Legend of Parish Fenn with. Fenn is a comic. Ciazarn is a short story - or perhaps eventually a series of short stories - with illustrations by Grimm. At some point I'll post an elevator pitch and sample art and I think you'll agree with me that Ciazarn is going to be awesome.

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Playlist 4/05:

Brand New - God and the Devil are Raging Inside Me
Canadian Rifle - Peaceful Death
Canadian Rifle - Deep Ends
King Khan and the Shrines - What Is?!
Windhand - Live Elsewhere
Windhand - Grief's Infernal Flower

Playlist 4/06:

Uncle Acid  & The Deadbeats - Wasteland
Lustmord - Songs of Gods and Demons
Faith No More - Angel Dust

Card of the day:

Breakthrough. Exactly. One immediately behind me, hopefully one directly in front of me.

2019: March 18th: First Track from Final Cranberries Album

Wow. I didn't even know this was coming. I've never been a very active Cranberries fan, despite the fact that I loved their sound. Zombie and Dreams were HUGE parts of the musical landscape of my youth, but I never really followed through on their albums. Then, maybe ten years ago, I picked up Everybody Else Is Doing It, So Why Can't We and experienced a brief fascination with the band again after the use of one of their songs in the movie, The Sound of My Voice. I had just fallen head over heels in love with The Smiths - another band I had previously only dabbled with -  and with their music floating through my head 24/7, I began to realize a lot of other bands were directly influenced by them, The Cranberries one of them.

When Dolores O'Riordan tragically passed away in 2018, an unexpected thing happened on Los Angeles radio - everybody began playing The Cranberries again. What's more, from what I gather in my little snippets of FM radio at work, they still play them. Often. This feels a bit like some sad triumph for a great band that kind of disappeared for years, only to resurface after tragedy. Fast forward to April 26th this year, and apparently we get the final album The Cranberries recorded with O'Riordan and then, that's it. This is the first single, and both the song and the video are emotional heavy weights in light of everything that's happened. A fitting tribute to the late O'Riordan, whose voice was really unlike anyone else's on Earth.



You can pre-order In The End HERE.

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I received and began reading The Art of Hunting, the second book in Alan Campbell's Gravedigger Chronicles, and I can already tell I'm going to freak out when it's over, knowing there's a third volume finished that Tor won't publish. I can't express how high a regard I hold Campbell's writing in; I did when I read the Deepgate Codex, and the Gravedigger series feels like a serious level up from that, so in my mind, this is a fantastic example of expertly rendered world-building fantasy that does not succumb to "Tolkienism."

Yeah, I made that term up.

Anyway, thirty pages in, and The Art of Hunting has me as strongly as Sea of Ghosts did.

Playlist from 3/17:
Talking Heads - Remain in Light
Uncle Acid and the Deadbeats - Wasteland
Uncle Acid and the Deadbeats - Mind Control
The Pogues - Rum, Sodomy, and the Lash
The Pogues - If I Should Fall From Grace With God

Card of the day:

A lot of ending this morning. I'm reading this one at face value: I'll finish the reading of Shadow Play today. I had an excellent session yesterday, and I really can't stress what a game changer reading out loud has been for me. I'm finding the book very much on track, and hearing it out loud is helping iron out little inconsistencies in tone, syntax, grammar, and detail.

2019: March 12th

In Search of Darkness is the self-appointed, "Definitive 80s Horror Documentary." We've been knee-deep in horror docs at the moment, with both Horror Noire and Eli Roth's History of Horror landing on Shudder within a few weeks of one another, but who cares? I love watching these, hearing insider's interpretations, and building a scope for the tempest I grew up inside the eye of in the 80s. This is everything to pop culture at the moment, or at least the alleys of that culture that I traverse. Stranger Things is based on 80s Horror, Ash, Jack Burton, and Lucio Fulci all have current comic books on the shelves. John Carpenter makes records. Child Play's getting a TV show, and boutique Blu Ray imprints like Arrow, Vinegar Syndrome and Scream Factory and specialty streaming services like Shudder and Prime are making it possible for people to see movies they'd only ever heard of since those films disappeared off first-stage VHS rental shelves, never making the jump to disc. So why the hell would I not want someone to draw an outline around this behemoth?

The final Indiegogo is up now and ends on March 31st, link HERE.

Man, I walked into a book store the other day and hadn't realized Irvine Welsh released the 'Grand Finale of Transporting."

I felt so removed; I used to buy Welsh's books the day they dropped. But he's one of those authors I love SO much, his writing tends to steer my own, and I haven't had much space for that since starting to seriously work on Shadow Play, back in 2012 now. Of course, I've had a few long interstitial projects that have prolonged that, but really, this has been where I've learned to write genre, and there just wasn't room for a more literary pull in my voice. That's changing soon; I vowed to read at least one of the Welsh books I've missed this year, and now that there's a new chapter in the Trainspotters' lives, well, I guess I'll start there.

Wait, no. I believe I have to start with 2016's The Blade Arist, because I'm fairly certain this is what happens when Franco goes to America, which both amuses and terrifies me. Imagine Begby as your new neighbor. Nightmare fuel, that.

Playlist from 3/11:

John Cale - Black Acetate
Placebo - Meds
PJ Harvey - To Bring You My Love
Don Shirley - Don Shirley Trio
Erase Errata - Other Animals
Waxwork Records - House of Waxwork Issue #1 OST
Wink Lombardi and the Constellations - 10 Songs
Earth - Phase 3 - Thrones and Dominions
Chelsea Wolfe - Pain Is Beauty
Exhalants - Eponymous

Card of the day:

More Cups. Emotion and sensitivity as directed or acted upon by Fire. This is good. This will get me through the lag I've experienced in finishing the book, where daily life seems to be conspiring against my productivity. I'm saying it now: My birthday is on the 24th of this month. The reading of it will be done by then, which means a few days to listen to it, a few more to make changes based on that listening, and then it's done.

2019: January 31st: New Ritual Howls - Alone Together

I was super psyched to receive an alert yesterday afternoon that Detroit's Ritual Howls are releasing a new album in March! What's more, there is an awesome, limited edition that includes a splatter vinyl of the record accompanied by a hardbound book that documents all of the band's lyrics through the years, as well as tour photos. I ordered mine as soon as I saw it and if you wish to do the same, or maybe just pre-order one of the other versions of the album from the always wonderful Felte Records, here's the link.

Having tackled the setback with the chapter in Shadow Play, things are going great! Still reading it aloud to K, and meanwhile I unexpectedly began a new short. It's the first time I've ever written "Detective Fiction" and I feel like it's going pretty damn well. Of course, this isn't your ordinary Detective story. You'll see...

Playlist from 1/30:

Melvins - A Senile Animal
Wasted Theory -
Ozzy Osbourne - Blizzard of Ozz
Skid Row - Slave to the Grind
Uncle Acid & The Deadbeats - Wasteland
Uncle Acid & The Deadbeats - The Night Creeper
Talking Heads - Remain in Light
Ritual Howls - Into The Water

Card of the day:

Keeping it short because, as the card says, Stagnant waters rot.