Author of adventure/thriller and horror fiction

LOGAN (2017)

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loganreviewWow. LOGAN is a great superhero movie, a great movie period. It’s the year 2029, and the X-Men are all gone except for Charles Xavier (their founder and mentor), Caliban and Logan (Wolverine). They live off the grid in a remote site on the Mexican border, saving their money for a final escape from the civilized world. No new mutants have been born in 25 years. A woman finds them who claims her daughter Laura is a mutant who needs their protection. A road trip ensues in which Logan must get the girl to a safe haven before the violent authorities who created her catch them.

This dark film breaks so many conventions I can’t believe anybody had the stones to actually make it. It elevates the superhero genre into something that far transcends its roots, something approaching literature, and in my view is one of the best superhero films of all time, if not the best.

logan2LOGAN is R-rated, bloody violent and filled with cursing. The action scenes are amazing. Wolverine is finally unleashed to use his claws with gory abandon. No costumed figures throwing CGI effects at each other while exchanging witty quips. No character deaths that evoke yawns. LOGAN delivers great action but has a leisurely pace and focuses on character, making me care when somebody tries to win, when somebody gets hurt, when somebody dies. It’s a movie about people with superheroes, not the other way around, and that makes it a film you can invest in. There are numerous instances where something realistic or surprising happens, keeping you engaged.

LOGAN is not a happy movie, it’s filled with pathos. The X-Men reference a glorious past that is now gone, with the survivors suffering in old age. Charles Xavier has Alzheimers, which causes him to periodically lose control of his powerful psionic abilities. Logan’s metallic skeleton is slowly killing him, degrading his self-healing abilities and making him age. He drinks to self-medicate against the pain and also the memories of his troubled past. They’re still alive, but they’re hardly living, broken down and weary. They reference their past, but these are powerful moments, never cutesy or winking at the viewer. (The viewer can enjoy the film while having only a basic knowledge of the X-Men franchise.) When they are given the task of saving Laura, they get to experience life to the fullest again and once again use their abilities to achieve a higher purpose.

logan3Speaking of cutesy, the film also includes kids, normally a no-go for me. I have kids, I love kids, but they often ruin adult movies–Terminator 2, Aliens, Indiana Jones 2. Not in LOGAN. Laura is a fantastic character, a mini Wolverine, moody and savage. The actress who plays Laura, Dafne Keen, is amazing. She and the rest of the excellent cast led by Hugh Jackman, the terrific script, the gritty realism, the exciting action, all combine to create a movie that made me care and wowed me.

Highly recommended.

Orbit to Release My Next Novel

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orbitI’m very excited to announce Orbit will publish my next novel, ONE OF US.

ONE OF US is a Southern Gothic literary dark fantasy. In the 1970s, a disease produces a generation of monsters that 14 years later are living in rundown orphanages in the rural South. As the plague generation grows up poor and oppressed, its children begin to develop extraordinary abilities that allow them to rebel and claim their birthright. The novel delves into themes of prejudice, generational conflict, and what makes a monster a monster. Written in the Southern Gothic style, it features elements such as complex characters, rural decay, and the grotesque. Picture TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD with monsters.

Publishing about 60 titles each year, Orbit U.S. is the sci-fi/fantasy imprint at Hachette Book Group U.S.A., with authors including M.R. Carey, Joe Abercrombie and Iain M. Banks. Plans for ONE OF US are still preliminary, but the intent right now is to publish it in hardcover, likely in 2018, and then trade paperback. It’s the biggest deal I’ve ever gotten for a published work, and I couldn’t be happier to work with a quality company like Orbit.

EVOLUTION (2016)

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EVOLUTION (2016) is a French film about Nicholas, a boy growing up in a seaside community consisting solely of boys his age and their mothers. Immediately, we know something is off about this place. The rundown, bare appearance of everything. The strange food the mothers make entirely from what they find in the sea. The medicine his mother gives him each night.

Slowly, we learn more about Nicholas’s world as he does. That nothing is as it seems. That he remembers living in another place. Then his mother puts him in the hospital with the other boys, where the nurses claim they’re treating them for an illness.

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This is a tough film to write a review about without spoilers. It’s a highly intriguing film. The beautiful cinematography, the strange women, the sense of isolation the boys feel even from each other. There is little dialogue, with the plot moving forward in some places largely by implication and viewer inference than by anything being spelled out. The viewer pieces it together with something like triumph as the mystery becomes revealed.

But not the entire story, and that’s where things felt a little hollow for me. The story of the women and the boys is revealed in glimpses until largely bared, but much is left unexplained. And Nicholas’s taciturn view of everything, and unwillingness to ask even simple questions about what’s going on, is occasionally frustrating.

Overall, EVOLUTION is an interesting and intriguing film that I enjoyed, but for me it could have been a little more rounded out, and the protagonist could have engaged his environment in a much less stoic way.

PRIDE AND PREJUDICE AND ZOMBIES

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PRIDE AND PREJUDICE AND ZOMBIES (2016) is a historical zombie film based on Seth Grahame-Smith’s 2009 mashup of the Jane Austen novel with zombies. The result is a comedy of manners and marriage with, well, zombies. The film was a box office bomb and has been widely criticized for having too much talk and dancing to please zombie fans and zombie action that will not please many Jane Austen fans. As for me, I liked it. It wasn’t earth shaking but it was well done and lots of fun.

The story focuses on Elizabeth Bennett, one of five sisters living in 19th century England. The girls must train to fight zombies that have overrun much of England while girding themselves to find good husbands, as their father has no male heir to inherit his estate. Romance develops between Bingley, a rich and handsome aristocrat who falls in love with Elizabeth’s beautiful sister Jane, but the real event is Elizabeth’s growing attraction and repulsion with the dark and blunt Colonel Darcy. They run afoul of a plot to overrun all of England with a different type of intelligent, thinking zombie that intends to rule. Matt Smith plays an overbearing and childlike parson, who provides comic relief.

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I liked it for what it was, a fun mashup that is fairly well told with good pacing and action. The zombie element is weaker than the Jane Austen element, as zombies seem to show up at every ball and party, which for some reason appear undefended in a country infested with them. As a result, England’s surviving aristocracy seem to keep getting wiped out repeatedly. People ride off alone between estates, only to predictably encounter more than they can handle. It was unclear to me what part of England is actually held by people not yet zombies, and how its economy can even support an aristocracy anymore. As a result, the zombies appear to be a plot device inserted the way Raymond Chandler suggested introducing a gun–to spice up a scene otherwise not going anywhere exciting.

Again, though, I took it for what it was and with low expectations, and ended up enjoying it.

PENPAL by Dathan Auerbach

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penpalDathan Auerbach’s PENPAL is a remarkable horror novel packing an emotional wallop. Originally developed as a series of short interconnected stories for an online horror forum, Auerbach revised and expanded it into this creepy novel.

In PENPAL, a man looks back on a series of strange events in his childhood in an effort to understand them. They started in kindergarten when his class wrote letters about themselves and attached them to balloons that were set free. For a time, many of the kids got pen pals, who wrote to the kids c/o the school. Only the boy didn’t get a letter. Instead, he received a blurry photo. Then more.

As the man looks back, these disturbing and increasingly tragic events take on a terrifying single narrative.

In my mind, PENPAL achieves two big accomplishments, the first in recreating the wonder of childhood in a realistic way without saccharine nostalgia, the second in subtly introducing unease, menace and darkness at the margins of this childhood until they permanently alter a boy’s life. In doing so, Auerbach managed to create something familiar but entirely new in the horror genre.

My only criticism is the story is somewhat disjointed, the product of it being a series of interconnected short stories that jump around in time. For example, the first story happens after the second, which I didn’t realize until much later. The result for me was I got confused about the timeline and what was happening at a few points. So if you pick up PENPAL, my advice is make sure you pay attention to the time the story is set in.

Recommended.

THE AWAKENING (2011)

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awakeningTHE AWAKENING (2011) starts off really strong but then spun off into left field.

Living in England in 1921, Florence (the stunning Rebecca Hall) is a professional debunker of charlatans and supernatural phenomena, a profession she joined after her lover died in WWI. Then Robert (Dominic West, who is always great), a teacher at a remote boarding school, shows up and says his school is haunted. He wants her to come and debunk the haunting to assure the students’ parents that the school is not dangerous.

She reluctantly agrees and begins to believe the haunting is actually a series of pranks. But there is a very real ghost at the school, and it wants her.

That’s right about where the story went off the rails for me, becoming a very personal story about her and the school’s ghosts and their shared destiny.

The first half sets up a beautiful film. A scientist dedicated to debunking ghosts come up against a real ghost, which shakes her to the core. An emotional recluse who lost her lover in the Great War finds herself attracted to a teacher who also survived the war but remains wounded inside and haunted by the ghosts of fallen comrades. A ghost child roams the grounds of the school, playful and malicious. The sadness of the Great War hangs in the background as part of the school’s heavy atmosphere.

The second half produces a series of shocking revelations with a somewhat (intentionally) ambiguous conclusion, and while well executed, left me behind as a viewer. The revelations are strange, highly improbable and for me, ultimately unsatisfying. In a way, the film feels like two different movies joined together. Personally, I would have loved to see the original premise carried through to the end, as I found the first half enthralling.

I wouldn’t call THE AWAKENING a bad movie. I enjoyed it for what it was. But what it was could have been amazing.