Lost Carcosa

I’ve been a bit busy lately, so I’ve actually managed to finish two other books before even writing about this one… And this one in particular happens to be Chaosium’s “Frontier Cthulhu“.  As with most of Chaosium’s short story collections, I really enjoyed this one, although I will say that “Song of Cthulhu” and “Hard Boiled Cthulhu” were more enjoyable for me.  Maybe I’m just not all that big of a Westerns fan.

“The Long Road Home” by Paul Melniczek, is a great story to open up with.  Following a group of Viking warriors, the story creates a scene filled with the unknown and peril.  This one does a great job at not being the standard Lovecraftian story in setting, creating a world, and horror intriguing and new.

“In Waters Black the Lost Ones Sleep“, by Angeline Hawkes, is a great story stirring up the doomed colony of Roanoke with the Cthulhu Mythos.  Good story.  I enjoyed this one.

Now, “Where Men Had Seldom Trod“, by Lee Clark Zumpe, is a story of heroes, adventure, and fighting the evils of the horrific old gods.  We see this one set in the 1760’s following two members of a secret organization, one the teacher, and one the student.

And the stories just get better with “Something to Hold the Door Closed“, by Lon Prater.  This story actually has a good lesson in it.  Greed leads to one’s downfall.

Stephen Mark Rainey and Durant Haire’s “Terror from Middle Island” was a good read.  Nothing spectacular, but still worth reading.

Stewart Sternberg’s “Children of the Mountain” is another really good story.  A fur trapper traps something otherworldly and ends up paying for it.  I really enjoyed this one and the mixing of these unique creatures with Native American mythology.

“They Who Dwell Below“, by William Jones is anotherone of the better stories in this compilation.  One word, “Rage”.

Scott Lette’s “Wagon Train for the Stars” is a decent story about a wagon train and the odd religious group they’re carrying.

Ron Shiflet created a rather good story with “Incident at Dagon Wells“.  Its also fun to see Dagon used somewhere other than on the ocean coast.

Robert J. Santa’s “Ahiga and the Machine” is one of my favorite stories in the collection.  Robert does an excellent job writing about a Native American who comes across something from outer space.

And what is any compilation about the New World without a story about a gambler?  Jason Andrew’s “The Dead man’s Hand” does an excellent job injecting the Lovecraftian mythos into the old west, gambling, and a deck of cards.

“Jedediah Smith and the Undying Chinaman“, by Charles P. Zaglanis, is rather remeniscent of Robert E. Howard’s “Skull-Face”.  This story follows a gun slinging archaeologist who is hot on the heels of a Chinese priest of the dead gods who stole a disc from his museum.  The hero is strong and resilient, the Chinese priest dark and evil, and the girl, because what is any Howardesque story without a girl to fall for, is thin and beautiful.

Matthew Baugh’s “Snake Oil” pulls inspiration from the snake people.

Tim Curran’s “Cemetary, Nevada” takes place in… Cemetary, Nevada, a ghost town in 1892.  here we see a group of regulators following an outlaw only to find something got to him first.  This one is one of the star stories of the collection, and starts and ends in good ol’ Lovecraftian style with a letter written by the protaganist.

And for the last story, we have what has to be the most entertaining story of the bunch.  Darrell Schweitzer’s “The Rider of the Dark” takes Lovecraft’s mythos, smacks it across the head, dumps it in a pot, laugh’s at it, then stirs in a drunken aged cow poke, a young college student, Nyarlathotep, and zombie cattle.  If you only read one story, this one has to be it.

Over all, I enjoyed “Frontier Cthulhu“, and would recommend it to any fan of weird fiction, especially those with a hankerin’ for some old west stories.

You can find it over at Chaosium with a really decent price.

I just watched a French movie called “In My Skin” and wow… I’m not sure just what I can say about this one.  “In My Skin” is a disturbing movie, both in imagry and psychologically.  It is a story of trying to connect to one’s self, and maintaining a semblance of control.  When someone loses control over the world around them, that person may go to extreme measures to regain a feeling of control over something.

IMDB says:

A woman grows increasingly fascinated with her body after suffering a disfiguring accident.

The Playground says a bit more:

After drunkenly gashing her leg open at a party, Esther becomes obsessed with her body and it’s perceived imperfections. She begins to poke, prod, cut, gouge and mutilate her body on a journey to self discovery.

Its hard to say much more than that without really giving too much away.  Even with all the cringing I did, I thoroughly enjoyed this film.  It says a lot without really saying a whole lot.  The acting is good, and imagry is great, and the raw feeling is powerful. Basically, what needs to be said is add it to your NetFlix queue now.  Unless you can’t stomach blood and self inflicted wounds done really slowly and deliberately.  Then you might want to pass.

IMDB: Dans Ma Peau

NetFlix: In My Skin

I just watched Frontier, a French horror movie by Xavier Gens, and i can emphatically say “Wow! That was a brutal film!”

The movie is about a group of young people who form up a rather incohesive team of thieves to try and take advantage of the wide spread looting and rioting after the elections finish in France.  Having stollen an acceptable amount of cash, the group heads out to the “Frontier” to escape the law, only to end up in the clutches of an insane neo-Nazi family running a people eating butcher shop.

The movie was filled with some very gruesome and bloddy scenes, but was shot in an manner that was at times, quite often actually, rather artistic.  It was simultaneously intriguing, visually appealing, grotesquely gory, and realistically brutal.  We’ve all seen the movies where the fights look good, almost too good, leaving the viewer feeling like he’s just seen a good clean piece of choreography. But leave it to a non-American movie maker to put in scenes of a large man giving a hard right to a small woman’s jaw, followed by a flinchingly realistic kick to the head.  Ouch!

Head on over to The Playground to read their review and see a few more images and details.

Elder Sign Press’ “Hardboiled Cthulhu” is a great treat for fans of Lovecraft and pulp detective stories. It is a collection of unimaginable horror, leggy dames, and the stubborn men who charge up against both.

William Jones’ “A Change of Life”, a great pulp story, and John Sunseri’s Pickmanesque “A Little Job in Arkham” are both excellent stories, doing a great job with merging Lovecraftian horror into the gritty detective genres. And no other story in the collection has quite the Lovecraft ending as Robert M. Proce’s “The Prying Investigations of Edwin M. Lilliibridge”.

James Chambers’ “The Roaches in the Walls” is the star of the collection. Not only does it hold very well with the style of the old pulp detective stories, and to the horrific nature of Lovecraft’s terrors, but it’s also one of the most original and creative stories in the collection. Chambers wrote a fantastic story and I hope to read more from him.

Sometimes you fight your whole life for everything you believe is right and come up the loser for it. What keeps you going is the golden fragment of your past, that fading memory that stokes the last ember of hope glowing in your soul, because when that burns out - which it inevitably will - all that’s left is terminal emptiness.

- James Chambers : The Roaches in the Walls

I really enjoyed this collection. I could say something nice about just about every story in the collection, but I’ll leave it at this: This is a must purchase item for fans of Horror and Pulp detective stories.

You can find “Hardboiled Cthulhu” and more books from Elder Sign Press at their website.

Make sure to check out my friend’s writing. She’s an excellent writer and only getting better. I think we’ll be seeing big things from her in the future.

Apex #12:

Utilizing shorthand more effectively than most instant messengers or texters could imagine, “Clementine” by Joy Marchand is a star in this issue.

Interzone #215

In “Holding Pattern” by Joy Marchand, there’s a sweaty alien in seat 1A who says the plane is going to crash after its twentieth pass over LAX…

For the main feature film of my evening at the Boston Underground Film Festival, I had the pleasure of watching “La Belle Bête“; A very odd movie that after some thought, could only be classified as a horror film. Based on a book by then teen-aged Marie-Claire Blais, “La Belle Bête” is a product of teen angst. Watching the movie, we see an incredibly gruesome movie of love and hate, beauty and ugliness, and an incredibly fucked up family. Ask IMDB. They said “La Belle Bête is a powerful study of the conflict between beauty and ugliness, hate and love.”

Three things seem key in this movie: Love versus hate, beauty versus ugliness, and incest. The now deceased father was possibly a little too friendly with the daughter. The mom, in the absence of love from the husband gets a little too friendly with the son. The daughter, feeling the scorn of her mother for “being so ugly”, hates the brother, while at the same time loves him just a bit too much.

The son and daughter were both very interesting characters. The daughter, whose life is ruled by the confusion of love and hate, seems to think injuring, maiming, and killing loved ones can be done out of love to fix family problems. The good looking but vacuous son, through out the film is groomed, fed, and cared for just as he feeds and cares for his prized horse. This leads to one of my favorite lines of the movie coming from the son: “I am my horse.”

I mentioned gruesome and horror. This film was shot so well that it could have you cringing and feeling traumatized all with almost no blood or limbs being ripped apart. There are a few gruesome scenes involving blood but its the ones that don’t that seem to have the most impact. Actually, it was probably the child birth scene that did it the most for me.

What was really the most horrific was seeing just how fucked up the family became. And we’re not talking horrific in a “Hollywood slasher family fucked up” sort of way, but in an “Oh my god, this is so incredibly fucked up because I could really see people realistically becoming this terribly fucked up and it scares the pee out of me” sort of way.

If you ever get the chance, go watch “La Belle Bête”, then go find someone to hug.

HorrorScope has a review of “Cthulhu Australis: Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos”, a limited edition chapbook released in 100 signed  and numbered copies with laminated cover.

Cthulhu Australis explores how these tales can be expressed in terms of the world as we know it and more significantly, within the Australian environment. The tales are intrinsically Australian using Australian locations, characters and cultural idioms to create a unique expression of the mythos in a form not seen before.

Head over to HorrorScope: The Australian Dark Fiction Web Log.

MovieWeb has a review of The Slaughter.  A “Lovecraftian” film, although from what I gather, thats a very loose connection.  Still it sounds like it an entertaining viewing.

Any time you can fire up a movie and catch “Cthulhu Fhtagn R’lyeh” in the first two minutes, man, you know you’re in for something.

Read the review at MovieWeb.