X's For Eyes... And That's All

 

I have always carried a torch for a handful of songs from the Phil Collins/80s Genesis catalogue. I know, I know... I don't care. These songs are in my DNA from early life exposure. Also, weirdly enough, a lot of comic book memories are attached to some of them, this one in particular. Not necessarily specific issues, but eras.

The year Tonight, Tonight, Tonight came out - 1986 - was the year I first started reading comics on a regular basis with Larry Hama's G.I.Joe issue #49. The same year, this song appeared in a Michelob television commercial. Something about that commercial primed me to be both a Ministry fan and a Bret Easton Ellis fan, though it's difficult to explain the latter half of that statement. (Ministry's Everyday is Halloween would score a - get this - Old Style Dry commercial, just two years later. My memory so clearly stated it was a Bud Dry commercial that I would have put money on it. Also, who remembered that Old Style had a "Dry" beer? Not me, and probably not Dennis Farina, either. I mean, if he was still alive...)

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Play:

The New Puppet Combo game Stay Out of the House drops June 16th! I've already pre-ordered my copy for Switch. Why? Check out this gnarly trailer:

Oh man, I need to double-down on No One Lives Under the Lighthouse, which I played the hell out of for the first week and a half and then haven't really had time for since.             

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Read:

Blew through Laird Barron's third Isaiah Coleridge novel, Worse Angels and, exactly as instinct suggested, it went from a 4-star to a 5-star rating simply because I did not reread Black Mountain (Bk 2) first. Love this series, and it's put me in mind of tracing some of the recurring characters, so the instant I finished it, I picked up Barron's 2015 novella X's for Eyes.         

I've only read this particular Barron book once before when it first came out, and it's not a Coleridge novel, however, Tom Mandibole makes an appearance, and since he is a major force in Worse Angels, I really wanted to work backward on his character. The first memory I have of him is "More Dark," the closing story in Barron's 2013 The Beautiful Thing That Awaits Us All collection, where - in my mind at least - it's heavily implied he is a riff on author Thomas Ligotti. I read Barron's work as it's released, and in the past, I haven't kept notes, so I'm hazy on where and how often Mandibole has appeared. Hence the 'working backward.' At any rate, Mandibole shows up in the first two pages of X's For Eyes, as does Sword Industries, the Labrador family and who knows what else. So I'm in the right place until The Wind Began to Howl (Coleridge Bk 3.5) arrives.

 

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Playlist:

Lustmord - Berlin

Low - Double Negative

Ganser - Odd Talk

Les Discrets - Prédateurs

Godflesh - Post Self

Danzig - Danzig III: How the Gods Kill

Alice in Chains - Sap EP

Soundgarden - Superunknown

Huey Lewis and the News - Sports

Phil Collins/Genesis - Collins. Phil Collins. Playlist

Pastor T.L. Barrett & the Youth for Christ Choir - Like a Ship (Without a Sail)

Ministry - Moral Hygiene

Yeruselem - The Sublime

Pigface - Pigface Live 2019 vinyl

            

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Card:

Heading to Chicago today, so here's a card from Missi's Raven Deck to see me on my way and plot the course of the trip:

Things change; long-standing certainties switch polarity. Life is change, so embrace change. Kill. Your. Darlings.

 

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Isolation: Day 74 New Jaye Jayle!

From the forthcoming new album Prisyn, out August 7th on Sargent House. This is exciting, as I didn't discover Jaye Jaye until early last year, so this will be the first record released I can experience anticipation for.

Pre-order it HERE.

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Two weeks ago, my cohost on The Horror Vision and Drinking with Comics, Chris Saunders turned me on to The Magnus Archives Podcast.

Told from the perspective of the newly appointed Archivist for an organization known as The Maguns Archives, essentially an archive for people to log any experiences with potentially supernatural or paranormal phenomena. The idea is, after the person records their experience, the organization then sets out to either prove or disprove the event. The main strength here lies in creator/narrator Jonathan Sims' writing and voice performance. Also, the fifth and final season began at the beginning of April, so if you're like me and you're just discovering this, we won't have to wait between seasons, which, while I think would be a cool experience, is nice to know I'm jumping onto something tangibly finite. Below is the first episode, which I place here as something of a taste:




The Magnus Archives is distributed through the Rusty Quill Podcast Network, and is available on all current podcast platforms, as well as on the website and youtube.

Also, Sims' debut novel Thirteen Storeys is being released this August via UK publisher Gollancz. No pre-order is up yet, but you can read a bit about it HERE.

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Excited beyond words to have Laird Barron's newest novel Worse Angels arriving this week. I've been waiting for this one alllll year, since the author began talking about it on Twitter shortly after last year's Black Mountain. Worse Angels is the third entry into Barron's Isaiah Coleridge series, and while these have been more straight-ahead, pulp-bred Crime/Noir novels, each book has become increasingly more in-line with Barron's other, "Weird Fiction" work. Worse Angels, sounds as though it moves further into this territory, with a 'stalled super collider' at the heart of a murder mystery.

While I'm waiting for Worse Angels to arrive, I've finished Clive Barker's Damnation Game and moved onto a re-read of the first volume of his Books Of Blood.

This is another I read back in high school, early 90s. Unlike Damnation Game, I remember most of these stories extremely vividly, and am very much enjoying retracing their steps.

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Playlist:

Revocation - Teratogenesis
Mastodon - Crack the Skye
Ghost - Meliora
Drab Majesty - Careless
Deftones - Gore
Melvins - Houdini
Prince - Sign O' The Times
Pixies - Surfer Rosa
Perturbator - Dangerous Days
Bella Morte - Where Shadows Lie
The Darts - I Like You But Not Like That
Lustmord - Hobart
Various - A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night OST

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Linear thinking and discipline have, indeed, taken up a fairly large portion of my brain of late, and likely will continue to do so.