I certainly am having fun making up captions for these pictures…
“Great news guys. Every single one of these icicles on this planet contains a beautiful girl! And with any luck, none of them will speak English!”
“Now Bernie, remember when we had that argument about what color you mean when you call someone ginger? THIS is ginger!”
“I don’t know… Maybe… Maybe somewhere on this planet lives a man so horrible that all these women’s hearts turned to ice and froze them like this, forever! Maybe that man is me. I’m not perfect. She does look a little familiar.”
ICE CITY of the GORGON by RICHARD S. SHAVER and CHESTER S. GEIER
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Allow me to save some of you two trips to the bookstore: THE HAUNTING OF TWENTIETH CENTURY AMERICA sounds like it would be about famous ghost-hunting spots, unsolved mysteries, and hotel suites haunted by doomed lovers who met infamy. Not so. Here instead we find a history of European occultism, an entire chapter about Edgar Cayce, more chapters about past lives, spiritualism, astrology, and the New Age movement. Please don’t trust me to judge a book like this. I am not the intended audience. Fans of conspiracy theories who enjoy history should, at the very least, get a kick or two out of this voluminous, heavily-researched tome. The Haunting of Twentieth-Century America by William J. Birnes and Joel Martin – 2011 – Forge
Ho. Ho. Ho. I LOVE the writing of Liz Williams, whose Detective Chen series I absolutely adore. My rat army has orders to pick up any Liz Williams novels they may find. 15% supernatural romance, 30% drug-induced fever dream, 10% science fiction and 60% dark fantasy, THE POISON MASTER schemes to bring freedom to a planet populated by humans but ruled by cruel trans-dimensional giant WTF insect things that don’t make any sense and I don’t know how else to explain what happens here. Hmmmmm. OK. How about this? A woman is forced to go on the lam and is subsequently pulled into a treacherous multi-world intrigue after she accidentally kills a rich divorcee with recreational hallucinatory drugs (that she happens to take a lot of herself, being an apothecary). With nowhere else to turn, she finds herself employed by the Poison Master, a rich assassin from another world who CLAIMS to want to overthrow the insect things. But can he be trusted? Did I mention that she’s helplessly attracted to this dangerous man? His daughter calls our heroine a “junky”. I’m not doing a good job of describing this book. It’s a good book! The Poison Master by Liz Williams – 2003 – Bantam Books
While we’re on the subject of authors I’ve been reading lately, let’s talk about something by Mr. Kim Newman, author of Anno Dracula. Wonder what it would be like to read a book that followed the century-spanning lives of one of the older vampires from Anno Dracula? Our monster isn’t really a vampire that drinks blood so much as a vampire that finds sustenance in human terror and BAD DREAMS. This novel had: So. Much. Promise. Too bad the full last half of it was our protagonist’s experience of a bad dream created by this vampire to entrap and murder her. More like murder her with boredom. We read as she wanders through a hundred and some-odd pages of dreams that really should have been terrifying, considering the author and subject matter, but more closely resembled those dreams where you are looking for something but you can’t find it and everyone in the restaurant breaks into song and then suddenly you’re walking down a hallway looking for the bathroom but there’s a foot of water on the floor and you wonder if that’s water from the bathroom because if that’s the case then you might want to look for higher ground and here you are wearing your best shoes. Oh wait! Is that a character from that Pulitzer prize winning play? He knocks back a shot of whiskey and turns to the bar. He doesn’t know that his fiancee’s lover is about to march in with a gun, but suddenly it’s raining and the bridge is washed out. What were you looking for again? You can’t find it. Am I boring you yet? ZZZZZZZZZZZ. Somebody wake me up! Bad Dreams by Kim Newman – 1990 – Carroll & Graf Publishers
Many thanks to TOR/FORGE for the review copy of The Haunting of Twentieth Century America.
This one is kind of following the theme of last week’s pin-up. Those cooky mad scientists are at it again. Of course these guys are totally on the wrong track. The head goes up, gentlemen. Up!
The TEST TUBE GIRL By FRANK PATTON
MYSTERY of the BLUE GOD by HARRY BATES
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Hmmmm. This album cover reminds me of Madonna’s Like a Virgin cover. Am I wrong? It looks like music reviews are going to become a regular feature here, because I keep finding things I want to write about. I was familiar with the band Die Form from the ’80s. They are a French electronic band with a German name (“die form” in German means “the shape” (big surprise there)). Turns out, according to the somewhat brief Wikipedia page for the band, it is a multilingual play on words.
My rat army raided a used record store recently and brought me back a bunch of music, including some Skinny Puppy (Mythmaker), The Tiny, ohGr (Undeveloped), Black Angels (Phosphene Dream), and, at long last, the eponymous Matson Jones album. I’ve been listening to these albums for a couple of weeks, and this is one of the albums I keep going back to.
Scene from Metropolis by Fritz Lang
Picture the Fritz Lang movie Metropolis in your head. All the mechanisms, the light and dark, the steam, the architecture, the workers, and the robot. Now imagine some people in that movie going to the theater. This album is what music would sound like in the movie Metropolis. (Later note: Darn. Looks like I’m not the first one to have this idea.)
Ah! Brigitte Helm!
The album presents a dark, evocative soundscape. Lyrics are harshly whispered by a man or sometimes sung by a woman. My favorite track on the album, Hypnogramme, features singing that has been cut up and put back together again in jarring, mildly annoying ways that make my brain tingle. A monster can imagine a flapper ingenue in flight through a dark forest, watched by countless owls. Or something. The “hit” on this album (as indicated by Pandora) is Chaos Theory. One song in particular sounds like it came straight off of Massive Attack’s Mezzanine, which was practically all I listened to for most of 1998.
The painful thing about music like this is that a lot of bands have done this kind of thing so horribly. I don’t know from experience, but I can only imagine that it takes a lot of careful work to pull it off and not sound like a bunch of people you might find in your back yard wearing capes and way too much eyeliner.
Here’s my diabolical plan for their future. I’m totally serious and I’m not saying this to make fun of anybody. I love Lily Allen. So I want Lily Allen’s people to contact Die Form and I want them to make an album together. I want Lily Allen to sing whatever poison or love she feels like projecting that day, and I want Die Form to run her crisp British vocals through their brand of Gibbytronix, and assemble a dark movement to frame them. After the album goes platinum, they can all send me a check for my consulting fee. Thank you in advance, future.
In the meantime, I suggest you give this album a spin. It’s either going to annoy the hell out of you, or you’ll really dig it. I think it’s pretty great.
THE BRIDGE TO EARTH A Book-Length Novel of Men Who Vanish By ROBERT MOORE WILLIAMS
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The flying monkeys let our technician out for a minute and he snuck away into the light of day. Thanks for your patience during this difficult transition.
Fhtagn Spoken Here.
... the attic, a vast raftered length lighted only by small blinking windows in the gable ends, and filled with a massed wreckage of chests, chairs, and spinning-wheels which infinite years of deposit had shrouded and festooned into monstrous and hellish shapes. The Shunned House H.P. Lovecraft
by 
by 
by 
It looks like music reviews are going to become a regular feature here, because I keep finding things I want to write about. I was familiar with the band Die Form from the ’80s. They are a French electronic band with a German name (“die form” in German means “the shape” (big surprise there)). Turns out, according to the somewhat brief 
), 
, ohGr (
), Black Angels (
), and, at long last, the eponymous 
album. I’ve been listening to these albums for a couple of weeks, and this is one of the albums I keep going back to.
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