by David Bain

You’ll receive more rejection letters than acceptances.

The odds are against you ever becoming a successful full-time writer.

And they’re even worse against you maintaining the glory even if you do have a successful book or two.
​
And you’ll probably be just fine if you give in and quit.

***

If you’re still reading, you’re probably enough of a writer that all of the above doesn’t matter to you.

At least not to the point that you’ve up and quit … at least not quite yet.

If you’re still reading, you’re probably living at least an aspect or two of The Stockdale Paradox when it comes to writing.

The Stockdale Paradox refers to how Rear Admiral James Stockdale survived as a prisoner of war in Hanoi for over seven years.

Stockdale survived by never doubting he would survive. He held utter faith that he would live and that his very surviving would be the defining event of his life.

The paradox part comes in because Stockdale also resolved to staunchly accept the most brutal facts of his confinement.
​
Stockdale never allowed his faith to turn into blind optimism. Other prisoners held out for Christmas, then for Easter, then for Thanksgiving. And when the next date and the next went by, they would lose hope.

Stockdale, on the other hand, faced down the fact that not only Christmas, but also Easter and Thanksgiving and then back around to Christmas again likely meant only more torture, more confinement, more brutality.
Stockdale never lost hope - but neither did he ever cling to false hope. He simply resolved to persevere, day by day, in the face of the most extreme adversity.

***

Unless you’re a instant, lottery-hit somebody, you have to embody the Stockdale paradox as a writer or artist. There’s really no other way to survive.

I’ve seen far too many writers I admire drop off the map. I’ve seen writers have their dreams crushed because publishing changed and a lot of the smaller publishing houses foundered. I’ve seen writers’ dreams crushed because the self-publishing boom petered out. And I know writers who have been writing for twenty or thirty years who are now, at long last, giving in and giving up because the Stephen King-level success they claim to have felt waiting in their bones, in the very core of their being, the success that was programmed into their very souls, just didn’t come, not via traditional publishing, not via self-publishing, despite all their fervent wishing and hoping and visualizations. Their art became their prison camp, and they lost hope.

So let’s go full Stockdale on all this.

First, the brutal facts: You are not going to be a huge success. The million-dollar advance is not coming tomorrow or next week, not by Easter, not by Thanksgiving, and not by Christmas. And even if it does, you’re always going to be able to dream bigger than your achievements.

But the paradox part: If you quit writing and putting your work out there, you certainly won’t be a big writing success. If you stop believing in yourself, in the quality of your work, if you quit honing the craft, if you quit loving the craft, if your butt no longer places itself in front of the keyboard, the cavalry will have nothing to rescue.

Ask yourself this: Was writing a prison camp when you started?

Was a million-dollar advance your only goal when you started?


I know writers, and if you really are one, your first stories and essays and poems weren’t a prison camp at all - they were freedom itself. The big success might have been a dream, a hope, a wish, a sparkle on the distant horizon - but you showed up and sat down for so many other reasons.

Best to face it. That sparkle is gonna stay right there where it’s always been, glittering on that far horizon. But the only way you’ll ever reach it is to keep sailing for it, hard as you can.

I have never read/listened to THE EXORCIST until now.

Just finished listening to the 40th anniversary edition.

The novel - structure, the writing, etc. - is far better than I'd expected.

And Blatty's reading of his own novel is FAR better than I expected - his reading is actually in WOW! SERIOUSLY? WHY DIDN'T ANYONE TELL ME? territory.

It's a pretty incredible audiobook - myriad voices, all performed not just well, but enthrallingly - and the story holds up despite its familiarity.
​
​(But maybe I should have expected this - Because I was in a situation where it happened to be the only decent-looking book around, I read his sequel, LEGION, probably 30 years ago and really enjoyed it, and the movie based on that, EXORCIST III, directed by Blatty, is totally in WOW! SERIOUSLY? WHY DIDN'T ANYONE TELL ME? territory too - an opinion I've held for years now.)

How I Came to Write "Those Who Can, Help"
by
David Bain

I really like the story behind this story, because this story led to one of the great friendships of my life, and because it gives me the opportunity to say a lot about what words can do.

Back even before Kindle Direct Publishing - we beat Amazon’s KDP by a full year or two - I joined The Company That Shall Not Be Named. We were going to revolutionize publishing via ebooks. I think it was mostly PDFs but also a few other formats, and it was actually a lot like what http://drivethrurpg.com/index.php is right now.

It was exciting - at the start, at least.

I recruited authors. I recruited artists. I quit other gainful sources of employment.

Man, I thought I was all set. Freedom as a publisher. Freedom to recruit all my connections to this exciting new format. Even Charles L. Grant and Thomas Monteleone signed on with me to republish a long-ago novella they’d cowritten called When Dark Descends. I commissioned a beautiful cover and everything.

And then the publisher sat on not only that project, but project after project.

He sat.

And sat.

And published virtually nothing.

And paid nobody.

Including me.

And … well, suffice it to say, one day it all imploded with literally hundreds of authors rebelling en masse.

And I put out a statement publically divorcing myself from The Company That Shall Not Be Named, releasing all materials I had worked so hard to garner.  (The Grant/Monteleone piece was eventually picked up and published in hardcover by another company, by the way.)

But.

Along the way, I had intended to put together an anthology of dark fantasy road stories to be called Dark Highways. It would’ve been grand. You would’ve dug it. You see, I have a particular affinity for road stories. For instance, as the major work of my undergrad years, I wrote a 65-page paper exploring road narratives as they’re presented in modern American poetry, from the Beats through Robert Pinsky’s then-current book-length poem An Exploration of America.

And I also had an affinity for horror fiction.

And I wanted to see how my two loves combine.

One of the stories I received was “5:53” by C. Dennis Moore. And, as I recall, I rejected that particular version of that story, giving him some constructive criticism.

I must have handled the correction well enough, because Dennis and I have written back and forth pretty much every day since, for well more than a decade. He’s been there for me through a lot of rough stuff, he keeps me motivated, and we’ve collaborated on books like Band of Gypsies and Return to Angel Hill.

(I eventually did edit and publish a much smaller version of the Dark Highways anthology, available here. Dennis heeded my advice and rewrote “5:53” and it appears in this collection.)

So what about my story “Those Who Can, Help”? I’m supposed to be talking about that, right?

So, okay, shortly after we met, Dennis announced to me and a couple other authors that he had one slot left open in an anthology he was editing called The Book of Monsters. (It’s a nice little paperback, decently illustrated. It’s still available on Amazon, if you’re interested.)

So, because he’s sadistic, Dennis made that last slot a contest between myself and two other writers. My story won.

I was mostly working on my novel Gray Lake at the time. I was working third shift in group homes for the disabled and my job was basically to stay awake should something happen. Nothing ever happened - the residents almost always slept straight through the night - but I got a lot of writing done.

The monster Dennis assigned me was “goblins.” And very specific goblins, as outlined in a long, detailed paragraph he sent me.

The goblins, in this case, are much like the elves in old fairy tale of “The Shoemaker and the Elves”: helpful - until you cross them. (Of course, that’s not exactly what happens in the Grimm’s tale, but the Grimms and Hans Christian Anderson and all those guys were really messed up in their morality.)

So my thought was, Who needs help most of all in our modern-day society? And my obvious answer, given the location and circumstances under which I was writing, was: the disabled. I don’t make much of it, but I’ve worked, in one way or another, with disabled people for about 20 years now.

The title of this story means a lot to me. If you can help, do. (And not just the disabled.)

I wrote the story in a single night, maybe two - Dennis didn’t give us much time. It was due over the course of a weekend. By Monday I was back to Gray Lake.

So let me say something here about following your vision vs. writing to order.

My novel Gray Lake - which will probably always remain my favorite out of my own work - seems to divide readers. It’s not a typical horror novel. It’s long, it jumps genres, and it asks the reader to follow many divergent threads until they’re brought together at the end. And yet it’s exactly the novel I wanted. It’s the vision I wanted. Difficult as it might be for the reader who’s expecting or wanting a casual read, Gray Lake sums up the first thirty or so years of my life and I wouldn’t change a word of it.

So am I selling out when I get an anthology invite and write to order? Hardly.

First of all, you can write to order and stay true to yourself.

Dennis said, “Write about goblins, and write about these particular kind of goblins. Deliver me a good story by Monday and I’ll pay you.” And I did as he asked. And yet I stayed true to myself. I wrote about my disabled friends and their struggles. I tried, through the story, to make the world a better, more sympathetic place.

But there’s also nothing wrong with simply writing to order.

An artist should take up challenges sometimes. And those who can make money by exercising their art, should. Give the people what they want. Sometimes. Just be sure to then go off to your room and let your vision fly free. It can be a satisfying balance.

I’ll add this, since not everyone knows it - I’ve also spent twenty-some years working for newspapers in reporting or editorial positions. I think newspaper writing is itself an art - it’s one art among many open to you in this writing life. The conciseness, the ability to organize information into an inverted pyramid, exercising the restraint to NOT editorialize, knowing your stylebook - it’s all a kind of poetry, really.

I might be shocked, outraged, saddened, emboldened, inspired or otherwise affected by a story, but I’m paid to present it in a certain manner and to make certain decisions which, left to my own druthers, I might make differently.There have been news stories I’ve cried and agonized over, stories which have changed my life. They appeared one way in the newspaper because I was paid to present them that way, and because I respect the craft of newspapermen - while here on my blog, or in my memoirs, the reins would come off and you’d see a wholly different set of words telling the same story.

Words can do so much. You, as a writer, can do so much. You can get your vision down for others to see. You can articulate someone else’s vision. You can win friends, influence people. You can even make money, sometimes. And if you can write, you can write words that help.

Every month, my sometime co-writer (on books like Band of Gypsies and Return to Angel Hill) and co-conspirator C. Dennis Moore and I watch a movie and swap reviews. (He writes a lot more reviews and watches a lot more movies than I do.) This month we're taking on the Stephen King adaptation 1922.

1922: King’s historical tragedy is as much Grapes of Wrath as it is Children of the Corn
by
David Bain

I use some excerpts from Stephen King’s On Writing in my college writing classes, and I often begin the relevant discussions by asking students which King works they know. There’s usually a chorus of It and Christine and The Shining and Cujo and every now and then someone knows something newer like Under the Dome. Usually some have read a book or two, but mostly the familiarity is with the movie versions. Then I tell them a little about his literary legacy, the somewhat controversial O Henry and National Book Medal awards and so forth. And then, partially to discuss how writers (and books and movies - and, yes, even readers - in general) can get pigeonholed, I ask how many of them knew The Shawshank Redemption is from a Stephen King story. Or Stand by Me. Or even The Green Mile or The Running Man. Most students are surprised. Remove the horror and King’s name gets downplayed or virtually disappears. (This is also an exercise in how much attention we pay to the credits, eh?)

Add the Netflix original 1922 to the list of films many viewers might not immediately associate with King.

Most of the “posters” I’ve seen for the film feature nothing more than lead actor Thomas Jane - who also starred in the film adaptation of King’s The Mist - as farmer Wilfred James in a pair of ragged overalls in the middle of a corn field.

Oh, by the way, if you look close, there’s literally blood on his hands.

But most casual observers, I think, will nonetheless be put more in mind of The Grapes of Wrath than Children of the Corn. Which, on many levels, would be an apt assessment. Thus, sans killer clowns or vengeful, self-animated machines, this would appear to be tame territory for fans of category horror films.

Except it isn’t.

The plot involves a particularly bloody and gruesome matricide, and there are scenes with ghosts, mangled corpses and flesh-eating rats. Oh my, are there rats. Simply put, this film is not good for someone with a rat phobia.

Another exercise in how much attention we pay to the credits: I had to go look up the director just now, and I confess I have not seen a single other film by Zach Hilditch.

Which makes 1922 feel like even more of a success to me. This looks like Hilditch’s sixth or seventh film, but probably only his second or third non-indie and quite a departure from his other stuff.

First of all it’s a period piece, a tragedy in the classic literary and stage tradition with quiet undertones despite the moments of murder and mayhem. The cast and locations aren’t very big, and there’s a lot of introspection and psychology going on between the rats and harbingers of doom.

The film looks as bleak as its content. The tone of the film is a sort of relentless, dark, muddy gray - even when the sun’s out, the main farm house is dingy and unpainted, the clothes are faded, Thomas’ body is oily with sweat and his face is dour, lumpen and unanimated despite a sort of undeniable intelligence buried deep in there. The only presence with a hint of color and verve is Molly Parker’s Arlette, and her light is, of course, the one that’s snuffed out relatively early in the film. Her murder is the act that brings about the descent into darkness.
​
King’s experiencing something of a revival in film right now - lots of successful, quality adaptations. While success has usually accompanied his name, the quality hasn't always. King’s over-the-top monsters and serial killers can be fun, and many studios are happy to churn out cheesy boogiemen that earn out at least a little over their budget before they quikly fade like the thrill of a cheap jump scare, but kudos to Netflix for taking risks on his more literary, obscure works, like this one and Gerald’s Game.

1922 (2017)
by 
C. Dennis Moore

“In 1922, a man’s pride was his land.”
​
But when Wilfred James’s wife, Arlette (Molly Parker, THE WICKER MAN), wants to sell off part of that land--to be fair, the part she wants to sell belongs to her, willed to her by her father--and move to Omaha, Wilfred (Thomas Jane, THE MIST) convinces his son Hank (Dylan Schmid, “Once Upon a Time”) there’s only one way to insure the livelihood of their farm and family.  And since Hank is sweet on neighbor Shannon, moving away from Hemingford Home is the last thing he wants as well.  So into the well Arlette must go.
Seems like a simple enough plan, kill the wife to keep from having to give up the only life you know or want.  But in “1922”, based on the novella of the same name by Stephen King, a simple enough plan is usually anything but.

I won’t go into the details about just how terribly Wilfred has to pay for his sin, but this is not a movie for the squeamish, especially if RATS are your big bugaboo.

Suffice it to say, writer/director Zak Hilditch captures the heart of what made the King story such an effective read.  The harsh conditions of life on a rural farm, the paranoia and dread that creeps into Wilfred’s mind as he start his downward spiral.  And this Ben Richardson kid, the cinematographer, what an eye he’s got.  Seriously, between this movie, GERALD’S GAME, and IT, right now is a great time to be a fan of Stephen King movies.  They’re doing some beautiful work lately.

For me, though, the real star of this movie is Thomas Jane.  I’ve always been a big fan (he was married to Patricia Arquette and starring in Marvel movies before starring in Marvel movies was cool, so he’s got good taste), and I’ve seen him play the dark and brooding character (THE PUNISHER) as well as the light, happy go lucky character (THE SWEETEST THING), and this isn’t his first King adaptation, but man what a difference the project can make.  The less said about DREAMCATCHER the better, but his turn in THE MIST was a good performance, but in the end he’s just a guy playing a guy.  This time, though, he really loses himself in Wilfred James.  From his mannerisms to his speech, even his physical appearance.  Just check out the poster for it, and tell me you knew right away that was Thomas Jane.

Jane carries this movie from the first frame to the last, and he carries it like a champ.  Molly Parker, for her small role, brings many things to it as well.  Light in the beginning, quickly dulling to a shadow of menace early on, but her later appearances are downright chilling.  And I don’t chill easily.
When I first started it, I thought this had the looks of a slow burn movie, something I’d end up watching with one eye while the other surfed my phone.  But that quickly turned out not to be the case and I barely touched my phone at all except to look up something real quick, an actor’s name or the director, something movie-related.  Instead of a slow burn, it’s just one of those movies that, even when there’s no real action on the screen, it’s so damn well made you don’t want to turn away.  And that’s amazing, because my first reaction when I heard this was going to be a movie was, “Well, that’ll be another quicky piece of crap they knock out in a week and toss a title card on.”

WRONG.  Hilditch isn’t just a guy who makes movies, he’s a filmmaker, a serious director making serious art.

IS this movie art?  I’m not sure about that, but he has a huge respect for both the original story and the process of adapting it to the screen.  This isn’t just another job for him, he had a passion for this story and the movie that came from it, and that passion shines through.
​
Turn off the lights and silence your phone and sit back to a Netflix double feature of this movie and GERALD’S GAME and that will be a night very well spent.

Brawl in Cell Block 99 (streaming on Amazon Prime as I write) features some amazing out of the frying pan, into the fire grindhouse ultraviolence.

​Jaw meet floor.

Thing is, it has long quiet stretches too, but that only makes the brutality hit home.

And Vince Vaughn like I would never have dreamed.

And Don Johnson, chewing up cigars and scenery.

I've kind of hated Vince Vaughn in the past because ... well, he often plays a sort of jerky character that rubs me the wrong way - rubs me like steel wool on my scrotum, in fact. But in his role as Bradley Thomas, skinhead drug courier with a moral compass that seems to point somewhere north of "thou shalt not" but south of how half those lines finish, he is fully redeemed in my book. I find myself wondering why he even took this role when Silly Swinging Christmas Wedding Crashers III was probably available to him. 

I also kind of hated Don Johnson during his Miami Vice days, and maybe even more for his album than for the fashion choices he foisted on my generation. He's been redeemed in my book since at least Django Unchained and Cold in July and I'd even half-heartedly throw Tin Cup in there too.

The direction of this film. Yes, the slow scenes vs. the action. S. Craig Zahler did this in his terrific Bone Tomahawk too. But what caught my eye is the fight scenes. They tend to be long takes with full body shots. None of the hyperkinetic editing where the director only had to film a fist here, an unidentifiable blur in motion there. It really looks for all the world like these guys are fighting, like limbs are being broken, like skulls are being crushed.

I also loved the way a certain shoot-out was filmed. Zahler seems to actually be aware of the way most shoot-outs really occur - at super close range. There's a Grand Theft Auto aspect to it - one of the bad guys even blows up a cop car with a grenade - but even this and the cop-bad guy chatter is surprisingly real, going down fast and ugly, with some excellent sound editing too as Vaughn's character moves closer to, than farther away from, then back toward the action.

I also loved the lighting and the contrast between the two prisons Vaughn experiences, the way his entry into the first prison is told in slow detail to highlight the hell of the second.

And, thirdly, I was simply wowed by the script, how bad things got for Bradley and how quickly it all happens - the crux of the plot involves the kidnapping of Bradley's pregnant wife. Early on, Bradley is counting down the days until the projected birth. The cliche would have the action happen close to the birth, but the countdown doesn't get to progress far at all.

I went in expecting something more in the vein of a Planet Terror send-up, but Zahler's use of language and grindhouse tropes doesn't call attention to itself the way Tarantino's or Rodriguez's might. Neither Bradley nor the thugs he runs with are men of grand soliloquies, and rightly so and, as I indicated above, while there would be plenty of opportunities for the camera to dazzle, it's more about what the camera captures than how. 

So, Brawl in Cell Block 99 is not a fun movie in the way something more stylized like Pulp Fiction might be - the violence here is more in your face, definitely not for the faint of heart - but the almost quiet craft on display is something we rarely see in films that are consciously set in an otherwise over-the-top B-movie universe.

by
David Bain

That girl or guy you should have …

***

You should have what?

You really think you should have married her?

Or should you at least have made it official, acknowledged how you really felt?
Yeah, that. Surely at least that.

***

Life is fine for most of us. We build a life, get on with it.

But you can’t help asking

What if?
What if?
What if?

***

The girl in “A Deeper Level” isn’t even one specific girl.

In real life, to list just a few, there was:

The perfect girl I had that painful years-long crush on, who made a decent amount of overtures, but we were from wildly different social strata.

The girl I’m glad who, it turned out, I didn’t get pregnant. Her life seems fine now but what were we thinking?

The girl in college who I unfairly dumped just because it got too scary and way too real too fast.

The girl who apologized twenty-five years later.

The girl who ghosted me at exactly the wrong point and I was afraid of relationships for a long, long time.

The girl who … yeah, wow, she was married. Alrighty then.

The girl who, yeah, I’ll never forget that lovely long weekend in bed but it would never have worked out much beyond that.

The girl who was a little too young for me.

The girl who was a little too old for me.

The girl who really liked me and would have been fun enough, but where was the challenge?

The girl who was my best friend and she knew the real me and, yeah, she would have straightened me out eventually - I really believe it - but, at that point in my life, my messed up side was winning and … yeah. These days my marriage has had its ups and downs, but I’m still with it. She seems pretty happy in hers. We leave each other birthday greetings on Facebook.

***

Who am I trying to kid?

“A Deeper Level” is about that last girl.

The other girls are in other stories, or will be.

You’re all still in my head if not my heart, ladies.

***

Through high school and my teen years, I was two distinct people.

My Dungeons & Dragons, straight A nerd side.

And my too cool to care chemical enthusiast street kid side.

It was  Metallica and Guns n’ Roses for my public party persona and then I’d stumble home and hide in my room and write mopey poetry to The Smiths and The Cure.

The Guns n’ Roses side got me in a lot of trouble - and got most of the girls on the list.

The GnR side won out for far too long.

And I still sometimes do battle with my inner Axl Rose.

The chill side - aiming to be more a steadily working Dylan or Bono these days than a mopey Morrissey - eventually emerged victorious, however, because I’m not dead and I’m not in jail and while it can sometimes take a damned long time, it doesn’t take me fourteen frickin’ years to write a god damned book.

***

I wrote “A Deeper Level” in no more than a night or two while working third shift in a group home for disabled people - my job was basically to stay awake, and writing helped that.

I wrote it during a time of reflection when I was realizing I could give up my more destructive side, and I’m deeply grateful to the story for helping me with that. Hopefully readers find something in it too.

The story sold to an anthology - it was the lead story, in fact - and it’s a tale that I’m particularly proud of. 

I put this in my Green River Crime Stories collection, but I’ll be honest; it’s not heavily crime nor is it heavily horror. I categorize it as crime because every street kid I hung out with was a little bit thuggy - you had to be - and it’s horror because what happens toward the end of the story is pretty horrible.

But either way, it’s among my favorites of my own work because the story itself is about as true as it gets.

On many levels.

And, for me, you can’t do better than that - mining that deeper truth.
​
​In fiction or in real life.

 - Following in his father's Different Seasons footsteps, Joe Hill proves himself a virtuoso in Strange Weather, a collection of four diverse novellas. 

Let's look at these tales one at a time, in order. 

The first, "Snapshot," is fun, old school horror. A magic device - and a person corrupted by said magic device - enters the life of an adolescent. We've been here before - not just in the elder King's work, but all over the horror genre. Haunted or cursed objects amplify and challenge the good and evil within an individual and its Hill's expertise at painting strong pictures, creating strong images that lifts this beyond your average demon-possessed random object story. In short, this is a fun '80s B movie with a nice tie-in to modern technology at the end. 

"Loaded" is easily the best of the bunch. Some might argue for "Aloft" but I'll argue for this one, because, hey, let's not pull punches: It's the story we need right now on the gun rights issue. And, like Spike Lee's Do the Right Thing, it doesn't necessarily provide answers; it only shows us all the facets and leaves us to reach our own conclusions. I'm trying to think of a more devastating last line in all of literature, and I'm having trouble. This one might very seriously top the list - I'm talking about all literature here. This story should, and I hope will be remembered a hundred years from now or more. 

"Aloft" has gorgeous visuals. Again, image is Hill's strong suit. Anyone who's ever built castles out of clouds during a plane flight will identify with this one. How many of us have been up there in anything from a puddle-jumper to a 747 and imagined traversing what certainly looks like the mountainous terrain of a cumulus cloud. There's a dash of UFO conspiracy, a shot of Lovecraftian tentacle horror and even a nod or two to Verne and Wells and maybe even Poe, but it adds up to something wholly original and entertaining, as well as a statement on the heart wanting what the heart wants, reality be damned. 

"Rain" is easily the weakest of the bunch, though it remains highly entertaining. In an afterward, Hill notes that he's using this piece to poke some fun at his own post-apocalyptic novel, The Fireman. Sigh. I hesitate to tell you this - because what good does it do for the likes of me to be critical of a much more successful author - but, while I'm a huge fan of NOS4A2 and Heart-Shaped Box and a middling fan of Horns (which I think is highly uneven - it reads like several partially completed MFA projects cobbled together), I am not at all a fan of The Fireman. I find it a sociological slog of a novel. Once they get to the camp it's all talk, talk, talk. I just don't get the appeal. At all. There are some great images - I believe I've said elsewhere that images are Hill's strong point - but I frankly found The Fireman difficult to get through after the initial apocalypse. (I'll admit that, judging by the Amazon reviews, I'm by far in the minority here,) The writing is fine; the book just isn't for me. That said, I found "Rain" somewhat more fun than The Fireman simply because of the whackass nature of the apocalypse, the swipes at Der Trumpenfuhrer and the set piece conclusion. I didn't quite completely buy the main character's quest - I had the same problem with Brian Keene's otherwise laudable The Rising. Yes, I get it - we would do anything for loved ones. But be it zombies or a rain of crystalline arrowheads or a nuclear bomb, traveling cross-country to check on whether or not one specific individual is for real and for true dead just strikes me as kind of ludicrous - because, yo, they're dead, okay? And your faith, your hope despite all hope, won't bring them back. Not in the real apocalypse. 

But, nitpicky quibbles aside, all in all, Strange Weather is a collection not to be missed. The two bookend stories are plenty entertaining, and the two in the middle are classics. I listened to the audibook, and every reader - Will Wheaton, Kate Mulgrew, Stephen Lang and Dennis Boutsikaris - does a stellar job. 

C. Dennis Moore and I have collaborated on books like Band of Gypsies, involving body-hopping demons, Jimi Hendrix and the fate of the universe, and Return to Angel Hill which sends my psychic detective Will Castleton to his haunted town. We've decided to do an at-least-monthly movie review - he picks one, I pick one, and so forth. This month, Dennis chose...

GERALD'S GAME
- A minor King work, yes, but an important and triumphant adaptation

by David Bain

5 out of 5 stars

Dennis and I are a bit late to the party on reviewing Mike Flanagan’s cinematic interpretation of Stephen King’s novel Gerald’s Game. But I’m going to use that to my advantage.

I’ll often stop people midsentence who try to sell me on a movie or book I haven’t seen or read. I feel a review should be my own interpretation, bereft of outside opinions. Just as I like to go into a novel knowing as little about it as possible about what to expect, I usually like to review a movie on its own terms, in a bubble, as if other reviews don’t exist.

Which makes adaptations from other media especially tricky, especially if I’ve read/listened to/watched/otherwise experienced the other version(s).

Do I follow Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic? Of course I do.

But I’ve far too often found that while the “general consensus” will sometimes attract me to a piece, too many presuppositions make one’s life stale.

Taking a deep, cleansing breath before the opening credits and entering a film with your mind receptive allows you a more full experience.

In the week or two before I actually watched Gerald’s Game on Netflix, I encountered countless reviews, mostly by fellow horror and dark fantastic writers on Facebook, which said either, “It sucked as a book and sucks as a movie,” or “Minor Stephen King novel equals minor Stephen King adaptation.”

Then I actually watched the movie for myself.

Here’s my main thought:

If the name “Stephen King” weren’t attached - and especially if the idea of “one of Stephen King’s lesser books” weren’t attached - this movie would be considered brave and ingenious.

As I was watching Gerald’s Game I found myself thinking, my God, this isn’t just a good movie, this is a great movie.

And this isn’t just a good Stephen King adaptation, this is a fucking great Stephen King adaptation!

And then I looked at Rotten tomatoes and saw 90 percent of critics liked it, while only seventy-some general viewers admired it.

​Although it’s not unique, that’s still a fairly big disparity for RT.

I find myself wondering if the difference is there because the "professional" critics think more in the streamlined and episodic language of film, while the “audience” critics are more likely to have read the book or have the influence of literary circles and critics weighing over them.

King’s book is relatively slim, especially for the author of epics like The Stand, Under the Dome and the Dark Tower books. It’s basically a locked-room mystery with endless flashbacks and monologues. It’s definitely not King’s usual plot-heavy structure.

Here’s the thing. I really like the novel. I enjoy seeing novelists break out of their usual mode, and King is self-aware and well read enough that he can do so effectively. But there’s a lot of dislike, if not hate, out there for Gerald’s Game, the novel, and I think it’s not because it’s a bad novel, but because it’s totally off-brand for King.

All this is not necessarily to say I am The Great Open-minded Buddha of Film and Fictiondom, but I do think our expectations sometimes get the better of us.

I found this movie to be a good example of that. 

Lecture over.

Clear your mind.

Let’s talk about film stuff.

For starters, boy, that Mike Flanagan just keeps getting better.

I wasn’t much for Oculos or Ouija: Origin of Evil, but maybe that’s because I’ve become jaded with horror movies in general lately and my expectations are so low. (See my notes above.)

And then there was Hush, a great, stylistic closed-setting serial killer Netflix exclusive. 

Moviemakers like small sets like this because it reduces production costs - but viewers like them because TENSION. Hush worked on both levels - and with practically no dialogue. No big casts or sweeping scenery to distract. It’s all (mad slasher) man vs. woman.

In contrast, Gerald’s Game is firmly in the woman vs. herself category. King has worked in this genre, and variations of it, ever since his first novel (and the first of his films to be adopted), Carrie. The Gerald’s Game novel is also something of a companion piece to King’s previously filmed Dolores Claiborne, and I was surprised Flanagan chose to keep the reference to a property he doesn't have film rights to.

It’s also to Flanagan’s credit that he’s championed a film which some would have considered mostly unfilmable - the premise, which I suddenly realize I haven’t even mentioned yet, is that Jessie, our protagonist, is chained to bedposts, having rather grimly played along as her husband tried to spice up and rekindle their marriage, when he suddenly had a heart attack and died.

Flanagan and Jeff Howard’s screenplay then has Jessie talk to her husband’s ghost and a dream version of herself to personify her inner monologue. This technique seems to have pulled a few critics out of the story, but I don’t see how. It’s good dialogue and utterly appropriate to to the situation. Did they really want just more shots of Jessie sitting there, chained to the bed, talking to herself? Did they want a voice over? I would love to have seen the excoriations of that movie!

Also, there are some complications involving dangerous intruders that stretch believability to a debatable margin - they worked for me because, hey, fiction. I’m all about dangerous intruders in fiction. My disbelief is fairly easy to suspend.

Although the novel was published way back in 1992, for me, the whole thing felt incredibly timely; the story can be seen as a metaphor for the way our society, and especially Hollywood, treats women - the power plays by dominant males, the way society tries to trap (handcuff) women into certain roles; the victim-blaming. And there’s also the matter of a certain childhood abuse Jessie suffered at the hands of her father. I’m glad Flanagan decided to pull no punches in this regard, as it serves to strengthen Jessie, the character - both in our eyes and in her own - and give her the idea for her eventual escape.

Another point: I’m not a big fan of the tinting of movies. The Lord of the Rings is forgiven because, hey, Fantasy. It’s another world. It’s different than ours. I get it. But superhero movies are set in our world. Our world on steroids, yes, but still our world. And yet the color tinting in Gerald’s Game works for me because of the eclipse which is central to Jessie’s childhood abuse story. You ever been in an eclipse, even a non-complete one? Colors get friggin’ weird, man! Plus the events of the eclipse “color” everything else in Jessie’s life. So yeah. Tint away, Flanagan!

And I’ll save the best for last. Carla friggin’ Gugino. Damn. We’d better start considering Netflix originals prominently at Oscar time is all I’m saying. For both roles she plays in this. Or, rather, for the many roles - the strong, the weak, the dominant, the submissive, the broken, the desperate victim, the fighter, the arisen champion.

Yes, Gerald’s Game is based on a minor work. But only if you consider the author in question’s overall oeuvre - and it’s a triumphant film, not only because of where it dares to go in terms of what it says about gender, but especially given its nominal genre, which it easily rises above.

Mike Flanagan to the Rescue.
I Can’t Sing This Movie’s Praises Enough
by C. Dennis Moore
I’d like to start by making a case for writer/director Mike Flanagan getting some friggin recognition as an amazing horror film maker. He’s been on a killer streak since his feature film debut a short SIX years ago with Absentia, which was creepy, original, and a total mindbender. Then there was Oculus in 2013, a movie about a HAUNTED MIRROR, and he made it work beyond my expectations. 2016 brought Hush in which a deaf woman battles a mysterious stranger deep in the woods, and he makes a movie with almost no spoken dialogue 100% engaging. I haven’t seen Before I Wake (also 2016), but that same year he made a THIRD movie, this time Ouija: Origin of Evil. I skipped this one in theaters because I thought the first movie was a total waste of time and money, but what a mistake that was. Flanagan took the idea of a sequel/prequel and completely eradicated the bad taste left by the first Ouija. The man is on a streak you rarely see in horror movies these days.

But when I heard someone was making a movie of Stephen King’s Gerald’s Game, I had a few first thoughts. WHY? That was one of my least favorite King novels. It’s about a woman handcuffed to a bed after her husband has a heart attack, the movie’ll be 25 minutes long. Amid all of those first thoughts, not a one of them was positive.

Maybe if I’d done the research and found out Mike Flanagan was writing and directing, because my God what a job he’s done on this story. King has long been considered the MASTER of modern horror, but this writer/director from Salem, MA has taken one of the “master’s” worst books and made it into one of the BEST King movie adaptations.

We follow Jessie (Carla Gugino) and Gerald Burlingame (Bruce Greenwood) on a getaway to their remote cabin where Gerald wants to engage in some sex games. He wants to start with the handcuffs. After shackling his wife to the bed, he’s ready to get down, but Jessie isn’t feeling the role play and she says no. After some heated back and forth, Gerald suffers a heart attack and dies on the bed. Jessie kicks him onto the floor, and then reality begins to set in.

She’s still handcuffed to the bed.

The next few days are a fight to survive a weekend without food or water, and no one will be by the house to check on them until after Jessie is dead, so she has to do something, and quick. Oh, and there’s also a stray dog that’s made its way into the house and begins to snack on Gerald. And thank God for that, because Jessie is in no position to fight it off herself.

And this was the movie I was expecting, 103 minutes of Carla Gugino handcuffed to a bed, talking to herself and trying to figure a way to get out of this situation. But Mike Flanagan is smarter than me and more capable of turning a less then impressive novel into a stunning piece of film. When Gerald gets up from the bed and when a healthy and bitter version of Jessie appears at the bedside, things get even more interesting than they already were.

And then the flashback comes with Henry Thomas as father to Chiara Aurelia’s Young Jessie and my God what an impressive movie.

The performances are incredible, especially Gugino who practically carries this movie by herself, but Greenwood’s portrayal of the older and jaded Gerald Burlingame was a master class is RE-acting.

And the script. What a friggin script! The dialogue exchanges between Jessie and herself, and Jessie and dead Gerald had me cracking up one minute and with chills down my spine the next.

Say what you will about King adaptations, and I know some horror fans are not Flanagan fans, but I don’t get that at all, because he took what had all the potential of being in the top three most pointless King movies in history and turned it into, hands down, one of the best ever. I was a fan after Absentia and Oculus, but if this is the direction he’s heading, I’m all in for whatever he wants to do next. Because Gerald’s Game isn’t just a great King adaptation (it’s not too hard to be great among such a hit and miss list), but it’s just a great movie period, well-made, beautifully-shot, and Gugino is not getting the credit she deserves as an actress, simple as that.
​
I went into this movie hoping for the best, but knowing I did not like the source material at all, and I came out a changed fan. Still don’t think the book is any big deal, but if THIS is what it’s possible to do with this story, hell yes, Mike Flanagan. Do LISEY’S STORY next; I struggled to get through that book in a month, but I’d love to see his take.
Gerald’s Game is currently streaming on Netflix.

​First off: I wanted to slip some SF in here, and I almost included "Bloodchild" by Octavia E. Butler. Go read the story! Or anything else by Butler! Then come back and read my thoughts on Kelly Link's story and read everything by Link. 

You're back? See, isn't "Bloodchild" an awesome story?

But we're talking about Kelly Link here. Link is one of those wonderful writers whose next story will be something you totally don't expect. There is no typical Kelly Link story. There is no consistency other than excellence. 

"Two Houses" is, in essence, a clubhouse story. Once upon an old-timey day, the sensibility was that the actual first-hand horrors would be too much for the genteel reader to bear, so the horrors were framed by gentlemen in a safe and fancy and genteel club trading ghastly tales over their hot toddies. 

Add a century or two, and Link transposes the setting into a spaceship and transforms the characters into men and women passing the time after being called out of a cryogenic sleep by their ship's AI. 

It's an interesting effect that the tales we're told by the astronauts - tales which are illustrated and enhanced in holographic form by the AI - are generally the same as might have been told in one of the old-timey gentlemen's clubs. Only the setting in which the stories are related is futuristic, and yet, since this is the not-too-far future, maybe only one generation removed from now, in terms of the characters if not time itself - they've been in sleep-stasis, after all - is futuristic.

There's usually a twist or literary trick or two up a Kelly Link story's sleeve, and "Two Houses" is no exception. Without being too spoilery, suffice it to say the spaceship itself might also be a haunted house and it has everything to do with the AI. 

Multiple stories, layer upon layer, in fact, each well told within its genre and traditions all in one spooky tale. What more could you want? 

I bookmarked this ages ago.

I still read it from time to time.

It's pretty hilarious.

I already addressed humor and horror with Clive Barker's "The Yattering and Jack." 

But I didn't address over-the-top horror. 

"Yattering" attempts to suspend your disbelief even though you're in on the joke. 

This New Yorker offering, however, simply takes every horror trope and cliche and throws it on the heap atop the next one and the next. 

And yet ... and yet there seems to be a certain respect for the genre here despite the pointing out of all its weaknesses. 

What pleases me so much is that I kind of see this piece as a metaphor for all the safe remakes and reboots and reee-reee-reee Psycho soundtrack imitations out there.. 

If we get too safe and comfortable and familiar with our ghosties and ghoulies we'll be as disaffected as the once mysterious and dangerous drifter at the end of this story. 

We'll drop our machete and stalk off, saying, "I hate this place so much." 

Please, horror.

We need you.

Don't you dare abandon us.

We're hanging on by a thread of maybe two, three good movies per year. 

But there's a wealth of great novels and tales that would be cinematic gold if only they were given the chance. 

Come on, Hollywood Horror, show us some respect. Man up and give us more monsters worth cringing and cowering in front of!