Ready to give the gift of dark fantasy this holiday season? Barnes & Noble has listed the hardcover edition of ONE OF US in its Holiday 50% Off promotion!
The promotion runs today through Christmas Day 2018, and is both online and in stores. Other authors in the promotion include Kim Stanley Robinson, S.A.Corey, and Brandon Sanderson.
Click here to check it out.
I’m very happy to announce that my next major release is coming from Orbit in August 2019. In this novel, a brother and sister become child soldiers fighting on opposite sides of a second American civil war. The novel is about their struggle and the lives of the people they come into contact with. It’s prescient and powerful. I hope you’ll check it out!
Here’s a description:
After his impeachment, the president of the United States refuses to leave office, and the country erupts into a fractured and violent war. Orphaned by the fighting and looking for a home, 10-year-old Hannah Miller joins a citizen militia in a besieged Indianapolis.
In the Free Women militia, Hannah finds a makeshift family. They’ll teach her how to survive. They’ll give her hope. And they’ll show her how to use a gun.
Hannah’s older brother, Alex, is a soldier too. But he’s loyal to other side, and has found his place in a militant group of fighters who see themselves as the last bastion of their America. By following their orders, Alex will soon make the ultimate decision behind the trigger.
On the battlefields of America, Hannah and Alex will risk everything for their country, but in the end they’ll fight for the only cause that truly matters — each other.
I skipped over THE LAST EXORCISM (2010) for years, thinking it just another exorcism movie, and a found-footage one at that (insert raspberry noise). After reading an interesting review, though, I took a chance and boy, what a gem it turned out to be for me. THE LAST EXORCISM delivers a high level of creepiness packaged in a thoughtful, intelligent meditation on faith and skepticism.
The movie is a mockumentary in which Cotton Marcus is a minister who lost his faith after it was doctors, not God, who cured his son of a severe illness. Patrick Fabian brings real charisma, humanity, and likeability to the role, which makes the movie instantly engaging. Marcus still ministers and performs exorcisms, but for him, it’s a show, a service that helps people feel better but otherwise doesn’t mean anything. Still, after hearing about a child dying during an exorcism, he decides it’s time to throw in the towel, and agrees to do the documentary so that fewer people might believe in the power of exorcism and risk getting hurt. His last exorcism turns out to be a Louisiana farm, where Louis Sweetzer (a solid and menacing Louis Herthum) raises his teenage children Nell and Caleb in a strict religious household. Louis doesn’t believe in science because doctors failed his wife, so he’s turned to God for guidance in every aspect of his life.
What follows is something that surprises him. Nell appears to be genuinely possessed. Or is she?
THE LAST EXORCISM rolls out as both an entertaining possession story and also a meditation on God, faith, and fraud. I had one big criticism, which was the ending, which worked on one level for me but not as a whole; it could have achieved the same thing with a smaller scale. But so what. The direction and scripting are tight, the acting is terrific, the found-footage element plays as advantage and not gimmick (the two filmmakers even end up personally involved in the story), and the end result engages your head as well as your heart rate. I’m happy to recommend this as another indie gem that proves good story can make even tired old tropes feel like they’re young again.
PATIENT ZERO (2018) is a zombie movie that aims for the stars but only makes it as far as the roof. There’s something strangely compelling about it, the way those old Ginzu knife infomercials used to be compelling (“if you buy now you also get…”), but like those old infomercials, in the end, you don’t buy it.
The movie starts with the remnants of humanity surviving in underground bunkers like nuclear silos. The disease is a rabies-like illness that produces violent infected called Mad Dogs (those who know my zombie fiction are probably laughing by now). In one bunker, Dr. Gina Rose (Natalie Dormer) works with Morgan (Matt Smith), the only human known to have been bitten but survived, hope to combine his blood with that of the first infected, patient zero, in the hope of making a vaccine or a cure (the movie confuses the two). With a DAY OF THE DEAD feel, they work with the military to capture infected and interrogate them in the hopes of identifying patient zero. (Morgan can somehow communicate with the infected in their language, which consists of roars and grunts.) The officer in charge of the operation (a stock villain) thinks it’s a waste of time, resulting in conflict between the scientists and military. Compounding all this is a melodramatic love triangle between Morgan and his infected wife, held in a cage in the facility, and Dr. Rose. When an infected (Stanley Tucci) infiltrates the facility showing self-control and rational thought, indicating the infected are evolving and organizing, everybody is put in danger.
This is an odd movie, stitching together interesting elements, intriguing premise, competent direction, very good acting, and strangely engaging melodrama into a hot mess with weak villains, zombies that aren’t scary, some crazy dialogue, and a flat ending. The movie tries to be and do too much, but I don’t know whether that sinks it or saves it. Overall, I have to give it a C+.
Directed by Panos Cosmatos, MANDY (2018) is a bizarre revenge horror film with a hallucinogenic atmosphere, gallons of blood, Nicholas Cage, a crazy haunting metal score by Jóhann Jóhannsson, and plenty of visual elements reminiscent of ’80s metal band album covers and ’70s horror flicks. The sum far exceeds its by-turns ponderous and ultra-violent parts, though it doesn’t really add up to much. Just sit back and enjoy the experience.
The film begins in 1983 with Red (Cage), a Northwestern logger, returning home to his hippie artist wife Mandy (Andrea Riseborough). Their relationship is expertly drawn in quirky conversations, familiarity, and a deep, quiet connection that works well on screen. Unfortunately, Mandy catches the eye of a cult leader (Linus Roache), who summons his allies, a trio of bikers deranged and deformed by a special brew of LSD, to abduct her for him. Red escapes and for the rest of the movie rages a bloody swathe of death and destruction on the people who wrecked his life.
There are some wild set pieces in the film, such as Red fighting the demonic bikers, Mandy meeting the cult’s leader while under the influence of an exotic drug drawn from a hideous giant insect, and Red in his underwear downing an entire bottle of vodka and howling his grief, which starts off sad before plunging into the absurd and then becoming even sadder. It’s all good metal band cover fun, and Red’s revenge is a dark road trip into hell.
The film might have worked better for me, though, if the cult was more interesting, and what they worshipped was real. The cult gets a lot of dialogue, though little of it is interesting. Cosmatos seems to go out of his way to say, “Here are the stock villain cultists you’d expect in the ’80s,” which gave Cage something to fight but otherwise not much to appreciate. The bikers and their back story were far more fun. So in the end, the movie feels deep, which gives the very basic revenge story some mythic resonance, but the antagonist fails to join the party, weakening the movie for me.
In the end, I liked it and give it an A- for visuals, atmosphere, and crazy, but a B/B+ overall. Despite that overall score, I recommend it for anybody who likes horror movies, as it’s a unique experience that creates something new and somewhat powerful from our memories of the old.
TERRIFIED (2019) is an Agentinian horror film about a haunting growing across three homes in a suburban neighborhood. The characterization isn’t very deep, characters often make really bad decisions even when they know better, and the subtitle translation is frequently awkward, but on the other hand, it all comes together and it’s a hell of a lot of scary fun. I caught it on Shudder.
The film reveals the bizarre goings-on at the homes, which range from creepy noises to bringing back the dead to horrific murder. Stymied by these events, a cop brings in three paranormal experts to stay in the homes and investigate the phenomenon. They make remarkable discoveries, but these creatures do not wish to be studied. They want to destroy.
The real star of the movie is some seriously creepy set pieces, including a crazy sequence involving a resurrected boy. Some great scares are offered, but they’re done through powerful reveals rather than cheap jump scares. I love the trope of scientists investigating the paranormal, though their dialogue comes across as weird, which might be due to the translation from Spanish.
Overall, TERRIFIED is a lot of fun, I give it a very strong B+.