The Collected Literary Obsessions of a Living-Impaired Rodent

This week’s spotlight falls on a Cleveland Heights area comic book writer named Brian Michael Bendis. Bendis has made a big splash in comics starting with the independant publishers, notably Image and Oni, and then later with Marvel comics.

However, when he was with Image, he published a couple of well received crime stories — A.K.A. Goldfish and Jinx as well as a historical crime story about the Cleveland Torso Murders which he created with another Clevelander Marc Andreyko called Torso.

Today’s spotlight is on Fortune and Glory: A True Hollywood Comic Book Story — a story that tells story of Brian’s attempt to turn Goldfish and Jinx into movies. And here Brian reveals another side of himself: humor.

Fortune and Glory depicts Brian excruciatingly painful to make a movie out of his comic. Ever a glutton for punishment, Bendis leaves the safe sanity of Cleveland for the insane lunacy of Hollywood, not once but twice.

It started with an article on Brian by Spin Magazine which caught the attention of serveral Hollywood producers who dangled an irrisistable bait in front of him — the chance to tell his story in a medium that millions would see — the movies.

You’ll laugh, you’ll cry, you’ll laugh until you cry but you’ll enjoy the comic book.

And you’ll thank your lucky stars you live far, far away from Hollywood.

Seriously.

“Willie McCoy had been a jerk before he died. His being dead didn’t change that.”

TITLE:

GUILTY PLEASURES

WRITER:

by Laurell K. Hamilton

SERIES:

The Anita Blake Vampire Hunter Series #1

GENRE:

Horror, Hard-Boiled Detective, Mystery, Humor

DESCRIPTORS:

Vampires, Night Clubs, Zombies, Sex, Fetishes, Murder

SUMMARY:

It is our world except that the undead and shape shifters are real. Vampires have recently been awarded civil rights and Anita Blake, a resurrectionist (one who raises the dead in the form of zombies) and special consultant on cases involving the supernatural, is a licensed vampire hunter.

Someone is killing the older and more powerful vampires of St. Louis. The vampire master of the city, a prepubescent girl named Nicholaos who has existed for over one thousand years, forces Anita to take a more active role in catching the serial killer of vampires. To gain her co-operation, Nicholaos has another powerful vampire master named Jean-Claude, owner of the vampire/human nightclub Guilty Pleasures, set up Anita’s friend to be mentally enthralled by Aubrey, Nicholaos’ vampire-servant.

Anita is hurt by Aubrey and Jean-Claude has to share part of his life force to help Anita heal quick enough to meet with the Master of the City. This is the first “mark” that he places upon her. Nicholaos is barely impressed enough to let Anita live and try to solve the case.

Anita’s investigation is immediately complicated by the appearance of Edward, a cold blooded killer who hunts monsters and undead because they’re more of a challenge to kill. Although they’ve worked together before, he wants information about the Master of the City from Anita and he will torture her to get it.

Who is killing the vampires of St. Louis and will Anita survive long enough to stop it?

APPEAL:

The pacing varies. Like many horror and mysteries, description is very important in setting he piece, presenting clues and creating a sense of the real where other story elements might fight against that . . . such as the presence of vampires and zombies. But the pacing picks up quickly when Anita faces danger or springs into action. Anita rarely gets to slow down or rest and she spends a lot of the time reacting to events before she goes on the offensive and acts.

A lot of work went into developing Anita, her personality and her back history. The book reads as if we’d just stepped into the middle of Anita’s life and not the beginning of a mystery series. The focus of the story is on Anita, her strength of character, her moral code, her investigation, and her take on life and the supernatural elements that fill it. The relationships between Anita, Jean-Claude and Edward are more important than the mystery.

Guilty Pleasures is told in 1st person, past tense, and in Anita’s viewpoint. Anita narrates. She lets the reader in her head with apparent honesty.

Hamilton draws heavily on many of the traditions of the hard-boiled detective novel: lack of sleep or rest, a strong but unusual moral code, innocent victims used or threatened to manipulate the detective, several attempts on the detective’s life, etc. She also draws upon the traditions of the horror novel: vampires, sex as bad, the monster is overwhelmingly powerful but with a hidden Achilles heel, broken taboos, etc.

This is the beginning of the Anita Blake Vampire Hunter series. Originally printed in mass market paperback, it has recently been reprinted in hardcover.

READALIKES:

The Anita Blake Vampire Hunter series helped spawn a whole horror subgenre sometimes called urban fantasy. One of the most popular is Jim Butcher’s Harry Dresden Files series, starting with the recently reprinted into hardcover Storm Front. Harry is a wizard in Chicago and he helps the police in investigations of odd cases — the kind of cases that only Harry can probe.

“In this attache is the proof. And, as you can see, a gun and one hundred rounds of ammunition. It’s all yours. The bullets are untraceable. If you use them, they can’t be linked to you. You’re above the law.”

TITLE:

FIRST SHOT, LAST CALL

WRITER:

by Brian Azzarello

ARTISTS:

by Eduardo Risso (artist)

SERIES:

100 Bullets #1

PUBLISHER:

DC Comics/Vertigo Imprint

GENRE:

Graphic Novel (collection), Crime Fiction, Mystery, Thriller, Adventure

DESCRIPTORS:

Crime, Revenge, Betrayal, Trust, Heroin, Corrupt Cops, Conspiracy, Secret Organizations, Bartenders, Police Detectives, Gangsters, Barrio

SUMMARY:

The mysterious Agent Graves gives people 100 bullets and the chance to exact revenge on someone who wronged them in the past with full immunity for their actions — even murder. Some people accept and others don’t. Mr. Graves, however, has a hidden agenda that slowly becomes revealed throughout the series.

During her time in prison, Isabelle Dizzy Cordova lost her husband, Hector, and Baby, Santiago, is a gang-related drive by shooting. The guilt she feels for being locked up when her presence outside might have prevented their deaths is enormous. When she is released from prison, she encounters Agent Graves who tells her that the drive-by was actually two cops purposefully killing them. He gives her an attache case with a gun, 100 untraceable bullets and the proof that they were responsible. However, guilt and responsibility are tricky things for her and as she tries to work them out the killers move in on her. They know about her gun and it’s untouchability. It’s only a matter of time before they move in and shut her down permanently.

One day, Lee Dolan was a lucky man, with a thriving restaurant, a wife and two kids and the next day he lost everything when the police found images of naked under aged boys on his computer. The case went to court and though nothing was proved other than possession, Lee’s life was still destroyed. Now he lives life tending bar in a dive. Agent Graves gives Lee a chance for revenge against a woman who placed the pictures on his computer and framed him. But can Dolan kill her or will she seduce him with the offer of a second chance?

An elderly African-American woman, Mrs. Bugg, arrives at a police station to confess to Det. Choisnel about a murder she committed. She tells her story about a child’s mind ruined, a mother’s anger and a man named Agent Graves who gave her a gun and bullets to kill the man responsible. Now, years later The guilt of murder finally forced her to turn herself in. This proves to be a profound confession for the good detective in a rather surprising way.

APPEAL:

The pacing was modest, providing time for characterization. This is a noir story and besides the dark atmosphere and the secrets (oh the many, many secrets) Azzarello’s characterization is key to making these stories work.

There is plenty of characterization. Dizzy and Dolan come under the scrutiny of the reader’s eye. What will they do with the attache case? What drives them to seek revenge and what deflects them? Other characters get fleshed out as well; sometimes a lot and sometimes a little. Agent Graves’ character gets fleshed out but only painfully slowly over a series of stories and far too much remains a mystery. But it’s that mystery that drives me into the next volume of stories.

The stories are told 3rd person omniscient. There is no reliance on captions except when the image is a wide spread shot or the character is off-screen but he or she is still talking. The visuals are used to convey a lot of the story and action. There is a lushness, sometimes a puffiness to Risso’s illustrations.

Azzarello uses slang and contractions to create a sense of a character’s dialogue. He has a wonderful ear for dialog but it does slow down the reading until you get used to it.

READALIKES:

Azzarello is a crime and thriller comic book writer. You might try Andy Diggle’s The Losers series for aspects of both crime and thriller genres. A clandestine government secret ops unit is betrayed and almost killed. The survivors, united in a need for revenge go after the one responsible. But that puts them in conflict their old organization so it’s going to be an ugly painful mission no matter how you look at it.

Amy from My Friend Amy has taken the initiative and started a Book Blogger Appreciation Week set for September 15-19, 2008. Within a week of the announcement she had over one hundred book blogging participants and it’s been growing ever since. Not one to pass up an opportunity to celebrate something I love doing, I signed up both The Lair of the Undead Rat and her sister site …With Intent to Commit Horror.

If you are a blogger who writes book reviews, book summaries or about the book industry, hop over to the post introducing BBAW at My Friend Amy and join this growing crusade. If you enjoy reading blogs about books, you too can stop in at Amy’s website and join the fun too. We can make this a memorable celebration — one that we’ll want to repeat next year.

Then before long, American Greetings will make a special card for the occasion.

Tell you what, let me know if you checked BBAW and what you think about it. Do you plan to join or sit this one out? Do you want to do anything special that week? What are your thoughts? Please, feel free to leave a comment.

Beneath the calmest surface lies the deepest nightmare

Welcome back to the Monday movie day. This is the third entry in our look at the 2007 After Dark Horrrorfest Movie series. The first two movies had a lot to recommend them. Lest you think all eight movies in the series were absolute winners, here is one of the stinkers: Lake Dead.

TITLE:

LAKE DEATH

Director:

Daniel P. Coughlin

GENRE:

Horror, Thriller, Teen Slasher,

DESCRIPTORS:

Horror, Death, Killers, Drug Use, Mystery, Gore, Sheriff, Family, Rape

RATING:

Rated R.

SUMMARY:

Grandpa Lake is dead. Despite their alcoholic father’s warnings, Brielle Lake (Kelsey Crane), Kelly Lake (Kelsey Wedeen) and he black sheep of the family, stepsister Samantha Lake (Tara Gerard) decide to check out the hotel they inherited from their previously unknown grandfather. However, instead of going up all together, Samantha sneaks up by herself a day ahead where she meets an untimely death at the hands of two mysterious men in orange overalls.

The next morning, Brielle, her boyfriend Bill Welsh (Alex A. Quinn), Kelly and her best friend Tanya (Malea Richardson) and Bill’s friends Ben Graham (Jim Devoti) and Amy Leigh (Vanessa Viola) drive up to the out of the way hotel by a lake in Ben’s RV. When the group arrives, already in strife because of the flirtation between amorous Tonya and faithless (to Amy) Ben, they decided to rough it by the lake instead of checking into the hotel.

The death toll begins again after Ben and Tonya have a quick tryst while looking for wood for the fire. By then it becomes evident that the men in overalls are misshapen and possess great strength and brutality. Next Amy gets herself killed.

The Lakes and boyfriend quickly realize that something is wrong when they run out of friends and get chased by one of the killers. However, they are picked up by the Sheriff (James C. Burns) and taken back to the hotel for questioning. From there things get strange and take a turn for the worst.

APPEAL:

There wasn’t much in this movie I hadn’t seen already and done better. If you want to understand why this didn’t work, pick up a copy of the episode “Home” in the X-Files series. That one hour episode had more punch and grotesque and out right fright than anything in Lake Dead.

The one stand out scene was in the last minutes of Samantha Lake’s life. Kane and Able, the murderous men in orange overalls, break into her room, tape her moth shut and tape her down. They hammer a hollow pipe through her ankles and run a chain through it. Then they took her out on the boat. Alive but in a stupor of pain, hiccuping little breaths, Tara gave a compelling performance and her final end caught my attention.

This movie wasn’t the worst movie I’ve ever seen but it was pretty average. You’ll want to see it if you’re watching the After Dark Horrrorfest Movie series and are a completist, or if you’re looking for a horror movie that won’t be too frightening for your date. Otherwise keep looking.

READALIKES:

If found something to enjoy in Lake Dead you might want to try a smarter, wittier teen slasher flick like The Hills have Eyes, Wrong Turn or The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.

You can order this and other After Dark Horrorfest movies through the Heights Library web catalog or order by phone by calling the Cleveland Heights-University Heights Public Library.

So, do you like bad horror movies? Under what conditions do you like watching them?

Ever do a thing where you give it a good shot but ultimately you wind up dissatisfied with the results? I did. Last weekend I posted about Richard Montanari’s new book Badlands: A Novel of Suspense. And it felt flat. Thanks to the miracle of internet blogging, I can give it another try.

Richard Montanari is a local Cleveland author who frequently visits the Cleveland Heights University Heights Public Libraries.

Badlands: A Novel of Suspense, his latest novel, is the fourth book in the Philadelphia series. Homocide detectives Kevin Byrne and Jessica Balzano have a knack for catching the worst of the worst. And their cases become the stuff of nightmares often boiling over into their personal lives — threatening their careers, their loved ones and often their lives.

Badlands recently received a starred review in both Publishers Weekly and Booklist. In England it is in its second week on the Sunday Times Bestseller List.

Now it is time for America to find out what England already knows — that the Philadelphia series ranks among the top thrillers out there today.

You can place a hold on Badlands right now, by clicking on this link to the card catalog.

A note about that other Montanari book published this year: Play Dead is the same book as Badlands. You may see Play Dead if you visit Amazon.com or Barnes and Noble.com or if you explore Richard’s personal website. However if you order both Play Dead and Badlands, you’re essentially getting the same book with different titles and front covers.

For the last two books in the Philadelphia series, Richard’s United Kingdom publisher, Heinemann, has insisted on a different title from the United States version and they’ve always had cool covers. Don’t let the packaging fool you.

As for Richard, he’ll probably fool you. He’ll lead you down the path to the right solution only to double back on you and reveal another truth you weren’t expecting to find. If you want an author to match wits against, this is the one. But be forwarned, as the Shaman Rat mentioned, his books are not for the faint of heart.

But then . . . you’re not faint . . . are you?

Are you?

You can visit Richard Montanari at his website Richard Montanari.com or at his MySpace page.

“No tears, please. It’s a waste of good suffering.”

Welcome to the Friday Night Book. The schedule I want to keep is to post about a movie on Monday, a graphic novel on Wednesday, a book on Friday and a spotlight on an Ohio writer or his or her book on Saturday. However, other items will and do appear on other days of the week as they come up. Some weeks will be busy and other weeks will be just the four posts. And now, our book for this week:

TITLE:

THE HELLBOUND HEART

WRITER:

by Clive Barker

GENRE:

Horror Fiction, Novella.

DESCRIPTORS:

Pain, Pleasure, Lust, Sadomasochism, Sensation, Escape, Marriage, Murder, Puzzles

SUMMARY:

When Frank Cotton became disillusioned by life’s fleeting pleasures, his search for greater ecstasy brought him to the mysterious German named Kircher and the Lemarchand Box. However, solving the puzzle of the box summoned the Cenobites, those theologians of the Order of the Gash, and he got far more than he bargained. They took him to Hell.

Months later, Rory and his icy beautiful wife Julia moved into the childhood house where Frank and Rory grew up. They wanted to start a new life. After only four years, their marriage was rotting while Julia secretly pined away for Frank. Kirsty, Rory’s “confidant” and a lap dog of an infatuated girl helped them move in.

Rory sought out Julia, who was in the spare bedroom, when he got a deep cut on his hand. His blood fell on the floor where Frank had solved the box and it opened an invisible crack in the wall between the room and Hell. It was a crack Frank exploited to escape the cenobites. There he enlists a willing Julia in his escape plan.

Unfortunately, Julia’s leading prey into the bedroom for slaughter looked to a jealous Kirsty like having an affair behind Rory’s back. Her decision to get evidence of Julia’s indiscretions put her in harm’s way. Not only does she encounter Julia and the partially formed Frank, but she must also face the pitiless Cenobites who seek to drag her off to hell.

APPEAL:

The pacing is brisk like the best of Clive Barker’s stories, slowing only for a bit of background, mostly concerning Lemarchand’s Box and what little is known of the Cenobites.

Kirsty is the protagonist but you find yourself rooting her as much as wanting to slap her and say “Grow up!”

The storyline is mostly linear with a flashback to briefly touch upon Kircher and the “mythos” of the Cenobites. Reading this novella, you definitely get the feeling that Barker shared only a small part of the story of the Order of the Gash.

NOTES:

This novella was originally published in a hard to find anthology Night Visions: The Hellbound Heart edited by George R. R. Martin. However with the popularity of the movie Hellraiser, directed by Clive Barker, this novella eventually published as a stand alone work. It has enjoyed three printings. You can also order it as an ebook through Library On-Demand.

“Weirdly, Jupiter was the only thing we had going for us back then. It’s so damn big that objects coming into the solar system–comets, killer rocks, other stuff that’d make a bad place worse if it hit us–tend to get sucked into Jupiter’s gravity field and out of harm’s way.”

TITLE:

OCEAN

WRITER:

by Warren Ellis

ARTISTS:

by Chris Sprouse (penciller) and Karl Story (inker)

GENRE:

Graphic Novel (collection), Science Fiction, Adventure

DESCRIPTORS:

Scientists, Death, Insanity, Doomsday Weapons, Personal Identity, Genetic Heritage, Aliens, History

SUMMARY:

Europa, one of Jupiter’s largest moons, has the largest known ocean in the solar system buried beneath a thick layer of ice. Cold Harbor was a scientific space station assigned to explore Europa and when they found a massive cluster of sarcophagi holding humanoid aliens and a massive metal ring. Uncertain what they’d found, all but a skeleton crew were sent home and the United Nations dispatched Nathan Kane to investigate.

“Shouldn’t we be leveling off or not so obviously fatally crashing or something?”

Unfortunately, after showing Kane the sights, the station manager Fadia Aziz shows him that the Doors Corp. has a station positioned nearby as well. They’re further along in their investigation of the aliens and their artifact than the scientists. A quick trip to visit the Doors Platform 1 proves that the nameless station manager intends to uncover the aliens and the artifact and turn them over to Doors to exploit in every possible way, including weapons manufacturing. The visit turns deadly and both Kane and Aziz barely escape with their lives.

The race to unlock the alien secrets is on and time is running out for both sides. What is buried in Euopa’s ocean and why? Will Kane and the scientists be able to keep it out of the grasp of the avaricious company? How far will the station manager go to stake his company’s claim?

APPEAL:

I enjoyed this story. It was a simple story plot wise but with breath taking images and thoughtful dialog, I didn’t notice the gently slow pace until the violence at the end. I loved the illustrations. Especially Europa’s ice covered ocean. The faces of the characters have expressions that are easily understood.

“Paranoids are just people with all the facts.”

The pacing was slow giving time for characterization. The dialog is held down to a minimum but it tends to pack more of a punch. It is a little harsh and sexually descriptive in places. The story is told 3rd person limited omniscient — mostly from Nathan’s point of view with brief snapshots from other people’s view point. Captions are used to signal time and place only.

READALIKES:

like the best science fiction writers, Warren Ellis takes scientific theory or even little known facts and extrapolates to a logical conclusion. In comics no one writes quite like Warren. If you don’t mind grittier tales, try Dark Blue, Desolation Jones and the entire Transmetropolitan series, all by Warren Ellis.

(Many thanks to John Paul Allen for letting me repost this powerful story –Greg)

I received a message from someone letting me know she ordered a copy of Gifted Trust from Amazon.com so I thought I’d write a little bit about the story that got me into all this. The following many of you already know. I’ve told you and it was covered in a magazine article a few years ago. As time passed I’ve had less reason to share, because we tend to promote our newest work with hopes that people will go back and read what we offered earlier. Though I’ve put out some short stories GT is the most available thing out there.

Note 1: I repeat things - constantly. It’s a Allen thing as is stretching a two minute story into 20 minutes. Ask Lisa, who deals with this all the time. Her means of dealing with it is to sound out a number, 15… 7… 22… whatever. It doesn’t matter, her purpose is to inform me that I’ve told it before. We laugh and I don’t finish. Betty, my second wife would roll her index finger to suggest I jump forward and Pam just sat there and listened. With her I’d ask why she didn’t stop me and she’d respond, “You always tell it a little different each time.” So if you’ve read/heard the following and you remember it different keep that in mind. The important stuff is here, but even I get tired of telling it and if Hilary can screw up on her sniper details I claim the same fault.

I looked at my son and thought, what would someone like the killer think.

Mt. Pleasant, Michigan 1983 - I was a single dad/student at Central Michigan University. At the time my major was journalism and my son was four. We lived in one of the family housing units and I was the only single father among many families and several single moms.
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“Your watch. After you left for work this morning, it stopped, didn’t it? Whenever a clock stops, they’re coming.”

Last week we began our look at movies from After Dark Horrrorfest Movie series. We started with Borderland, a shocking bloodfest I couldn’t finish watching the first time but one that was worth the effort to see it the second. Now I want to talk about my favorite movie of the lot The Deaths of Ian Stone.

TITLE:

THE DEATHS OF IAN STONE

Director:

Dario Piana

GENRE:

Horror, Fantasy, Thriller

DESCRIPTORS:

Horror, Addiction, Alternate Realities, Death, Killers, Drug Use, Monsters, Torture, Mystery, Past Life

RATING:

Rated R.

SUMMARY:

Ian Stone (Mike Vogel) is a college hockey superstar and just about to score the last minute game winning goal when the clock stops. After being glared at by his teammates and consoled by his girlfriend Jenny (Christina Cole), Ian Stone is killed in a seemly random act of violence.

Ian Stone is a nine to fiver, over worked and under paid in corporate America with a live-in girlfriend Medea (Jaime Murray) until he witnesses a paramedic take a man’s life . . . or was he rescuing him? Confusion remains until the next day where on the way to work the clocks stop and he is brutally killed.

“Getting your customer to their destination alive usually makes for a better tip.”

Ian Stone is a cabby who has just met an extraordinary woman in what is otherwise a dead end life. She takes an interest in him. Things just might be looking up until the clocks stop and he is killed . . . again.

Ian Stone is unemployed and on government assistance trying to get his act together and find a job until the clocks stop . . .

Ian Stone is a heroin junkie coming down from his last high when the clocks stop . . .

They are hunters. Every time the clock stops, it means they’ve targeted their prey and are closing in. Their prey is Ian Stone. And each time they kill him he awakens in a new life.

But Ian has a secret . . . one so dangerous not even he can remember it, but little by little through each ruined life, they come closer to discovering just what that secret is.

And then there will be no more lives for Ian Stone. . . .

APPEAL:

“Listen, you’re a smart boy. Don’t let denial get in the way of that.”

This is a movie where the fun is in the reveals and the twist at the end. Why is Ian Stone being killed? How can he keep coming back to life? What are the hunters and what are they really after? And what are the shadowy creatures he keeps glimpsing out of the corner of his eye?

As horror films go, this one was light on the scare. However it was a captivating movie. The mysteries surrounding Ian drive the movie. It has some snappy dialog which made settling on one quote for this article, impossible. The acting was good and the special effects were fun — surprising considering that this was not a multi-million dollar movie.

Any story that deals with the unreality of reality has an uphill battle with internal logic as well as getting the audience to suspend disbelief. This movie had a well thought out mythos that is slowly revealed in the second half but you have to hang with the film through multiple lives without explanation in the first half. It also features creatures that were fresh and a visually fun to watch.

READALIKES:

If you enjoy The Deaths of Ian Stone you might want to try a noir reality twisting movie like Dark City. It’s a movie about a young man who senses that reality may be changing.

You can order this and other After Dark Horrorfest movies through the Heights Library web catalog or order by phone by calling the Cleveland Heights-University Heights Public Library.

Did you see this movie? What did you think of it? Did I craft a properly tantalizing summary or give too much away? That is a hard balancing act, especially with a movie like this. Let me know what you think in the comments.