You Got Your Star Wars all over my Zombies!

For my long-time readers this isn’t really news, but for the few of you who haven’t been here before, here is some important background info: 1) I (Bookmonkey) love horror, 2) Zombie stories are some of my favourite examples of the sub-genre, 3) I’m not really a fan of mash-ups.

My problem with mash-ups comes down to the cultural juggernaut that is Glee.  Basically, rather than write songs of their own, they spent a lot of the first season wrecking personal favourite songs of mine (I stopped watching about halfway through the season), and in the sixth episode the concept of the Mash-up was introduced to popular culture, (NOTE: Of course I know mash-ups have been in existence for over a decade now) or at least to me, which meant that the show could ruin twice as many of my favourite songs at a time.

Literary mash-ups really got going recently with the introduction of the book Pride & Prejudice and Zombies, by Seth Graham-Smith.  Interestingly enough the very same month P&P&Z came out, a little book by Joe Schreiber also came out, called Star Wars: Death Troopers.

In addition to loving zombies (well, loving zombie stories, I wouldn’t want to have any over for dinner), I am a pretty big fan of Star War.  I’m not as good a fan as my BFF Mike (who has written his own review of Death Troopers here), for instance I still prefer to call the Ithorian Momaw Nadon Hammerhead, because that’s what I called him for years.  Anyway, as Mike and I have been reading parallel genre fiction for years (he focuses on Science Fiction while I tend to focus on Horror) it is a pretty rare story that brings us together.  Last time it was the Canadian horror film Splice.

The book is really fast.  Clocking in at 234 pages I read the whole thing in about two days of bus trips, coffee breaks and lunches.  The story follows a traditional biological-based zombie outbreak (think ...28 days later) set on a prison ship about a year before the events of Star Wars: A New Hope.

I actually found the book to be a lot of fun – it was considerably less gruesome than the last zombie book I read (the classic Zombie anthology Book of the Dead – more on that next week), and the Star Wars stuff didn’t overwhelm the delicious taste of zombie (again I mean figuratively, who on earth would eat literal zombie?).  Did the story work?  Absolutely, it was fun, scary and probably a little more visceral than most Star Wars fans are used to.

I guess it could be considered a gateway book for fans of Space Opera who really need to up their zombie quotient (which by the way is all of them!)

Things I've Noticed: Father's Day is coming!

So we've got three days to go until Father's Day, and as my two lovely daughters are beyond the macaroni-pictures-coated-in glitter-phase, I'm kind of interested to see what they've got in mind for me.


As a dad who loves Horror, SF and Fantasy, I m hoping they've got a lot of options of things they can send my way.


I don't want to get into specifics as that may alienate whatever they have already decide, but I will say that no Dad was ever unhappy with higher necklines and longer skirts - you know, when I was a young man the most interesting thing we looked for in ladies was a shapely ankle, so, you know, longer skirts can still be considered a daring choice.


Also turtlenecks are great.


And Parkas.


Have I mentioned how much fun it is to have two teenaged daughters?

Genre Character of the Week: Major Alan “Dutch” Schaefer

One of my favourite things about showing my kids classics of Fantasy, Horror and Science Fiction is when they see something that is pretty amazing and it blows them away now just like it did me years ago when I first watched/read/played the thing.  Case in point?  Predator.

A year before he would direct my favourite Christmas movie of all time, John McTiernan directed a film that followed one of the simplest premises you can do in horror.  Man vs. Monster.  The monster is some sort of alien, which has come to Earth to hunt us, and the man in question is the leader of a team of army specialists, a man who never loses his cool, Major Alan “Dutch” Schaefer (played by Arnold Schwarzenegger).

Dutch leads a team of five men specialized in rescue missions, and it is for this reason that they have been called to Guatemala.  A Cabinet minister has been kidnapped by guerrillas and needs to be quickly and quietly brought home.  The problem is that the mission is a little more complicated than that, and oh yeah, there is a horrible alien running amok hunting humans.

Here’s what I love about Dutch.  The guy is incredibly good at his job – yes he does overlook one obvious plot hole about the creature, but other than that he is a man limited to his own abilities in fighting a clearly superior enemy.  After twenty-five years the film still totally holds up, and yes, I hope when they’re old enough I can show it to my (potential) grand kids.

Book Review: Downward to the Earth

Last week I continued on my way through classic SF into the 1970s with Robert Silverberg's classic, Downward to the Earth.  A story of a man seeking redemption and understanding form the people and places he has wronged, the book focuses on a man named Edmund Gunderson who used to be the colonial advisor to a planet called Belzagor (called Holman's World when Gunderson was in charge) the planet has been relinquished back to its indigenous population, an elephant-like reach called the nildoror, who have requested all Earth-men and Earth-technology be removed from the planet as it fails.

The book is clearly heavily influenced by Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkenss (one of my favourite horror stories, BTW), in themes, names of characters and even descriptions.  The story moves along very well and if I hadn't already had another character in mind for this Wednesday, Edmund would certainly have ended up as a Genre Character of the week.

The novel was intriguing, thought-provoking, and emotionally effective.  At 165 pages I would strongly recommend it for anyone interested in giving SF a try.

Things I've Noticed: I'm a Spectrum Scholar

So taking a quick trip out of my love of Fantasy, Horror and Science Fiction; I thought it would be cool to mention that I just got chosen for a Spectrum Scholarship by the American Library Association!  You can read about it here or here.  It’s really cool as it means that the debt I’m going into for Grad school will be significantly reduced and I’m in a pretty small group of people as only 50 of these scholarships go out each year and they can be given to any successful applicant attending any ALA-accredited library school in North America.  I’m one of only three from Canada and am also the first person at my school to get one.

 

And now for the really interesting part; as part of the scholarship I’m going to get to attend next years American Library Association Conference in Chicago, IL!  I’ve never actually been there before, so if any of my readers are familiar with the area, be sure to let me know what kind of must-see stuff I should be checking out.

 

SQUEEEEEEEEEEEEE!

Genre Character of the Week: Captain Cirocco Jones

For one of my book clubs last month I checked out the 1979 Science Fiction novel Titan by John Varley.  The story focuses on the crew of the Ringmaster, an exploratory spaceship near Saturn which has discovered a new moon.

(Mild 33-year-old Spoiler) Then the moon eats them.

Some time later our main character (and this week's genre character) Captain Cirocco Jones bursts out from the ground and begins the work of finding her friends and finding her way home.

The novel is one of discovery, as our characters have awakened inside this new moon and have a strange new world to explore filled with giant air-wales, centaurs and blood-thirsty angels.

What I liked about the book was its great sense of adventure and the specifically the character of Captain Jones, who decides that this world must have some sort of overseer and decides to go find them.

The novel is the first in a trilogy, and although I'm not sure if I'd follow up with the next two, it was a lot of fun, and definitely worth a read.

Book Review: Hide and Seek

Jack Ketchum has been a horror writer on my radar for some time now - actually for almost a decade, his novel The Lost went up against Neil Gaiman's American Gods for the Bram Stoker award for Best Novel back in 2001 and from that point on I thought I picked up a couple of his books here and there during used-bookstore runs over the years, waiting until I have a few in publication order to check them out.


A few months ago I read his first novel, Off Season, which was both quite good and really graphically horrific.  Let's just say I wouldn't recommend it to someone new to the genre, it was a modern (well, 1981) retelling of the legend of Sawney Bean (which you can read about here!) The book was both acclaimed by horror writers and censored like crazy.


Unfortunately, that kind of attention for a first novel meant that his second, Hide and Seek, was much harder for me to find during my expeditions to used-bookstores and eventually I simply broke down and ordered myself a copy.


Hide and Seek is a coming of age story that builds a surprising level of character development into 165 pages and ends with a grown up version of the children's game that goes horribly, horribly wrong.


The story follows a young man in a small town who has a summer romance with a girl who is both captivating and clearly emotionally damaged almost from the start.  Throughout the whole book there is a building atmosphere of horror as you know something just terrible is going to happen to this couple, and when it hits, it's really bad.


The thing that really struck me about this book was just how great the character development was, there were all these quiet moments and shocking moments and in a lot of ways it was really easy to fall into this whirlwind romance, increadibly intense and really real feeling.


If you can get your hands on it, this is a really engrossing read, but I will warn you, it gets pretty hard to read towards the end.