Author of sci-fi/fantasy, horror and adventure/thriller fiction

MIDNIGHT MASS

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Just finished MIDNIGHT MASS on Netflix, and WOW. If you’re looking for a brilliant horror story that also serves up a powerful analysis of religious belief, you should stop reading this dumb review and start binge-watching now.

If you’re still with me, here goes: MIDNIGHT MASS is the creation of Mike Flanagan, one of the creators of THE HAUNTING OF HILL HOUSE, which I also enjoyed. In this story, a mysterious priest arrives at a declining fishing island to take over a Catholic church, but he’s not alone. Soon, miracles and deaths start occurring, forcing the ensemble cast of locals to choose sides in what some seems as a spiritual war and others as a threat to the entire world.

Flanagan gets pretty much everything about this miniseries right. As a creator, he often leans heavily on theme, and MIDNIGHT MASS is no exception. The theme here is the search for meaning in life when all things die, how this affects people differently in good and bad ways, and the struggle to know an all-powerful God that seems to be unknowable. I tackled a lot of these themes in my novel THE CHILDREN OF RED PEAK, and while I went for it and produced something I believe is at least thoughtful, Flanagan utterly dominated it. His script contains these long, wonderful monologues that are really meditations and shaded views on purpose, meaning, life after death, and more. He overdoes the expository dialogue at times, but I didn’t mind as it’s good stuff.

I’ve always been fascinated by this theme, which is a tough one to tackle right: the question of whether life has any inherent meaning if death is final, and the question of whether a higher power is guiding us to a higher purpose. I’ve always felt if you strip out the human longing and projection, take out the idea that God has a paternal love for each and every one of us, God is actually a source of cosmic horror, an all-powerful being that inflicts great suffering and occasionally helps us based on its plan and that maybe can be appeased with the right behavior and sacrifices. Flanagan shows us all this and makes us feel it while being respectful to all sides of the conversation. Flanagan asks the question, and the characters provide a multitude of answers.

Back to the show… The acting is terrific, with some familiar faces from previous Flanagan works like Kate Siegel, and led by Hamish Linklater, whom I’d only seen previously in THE BIG SHORT. Playing Father Paul, he chews the scenery and absolutely dominates every scene he’s in. Paul is such a greater character, a deeply spiritual and religious man who is at heart good but who deludes himself into interpreting a great evil into something miraculous and Godly. Bev is another great character, a very religious and proper lady who uses her religion to justify her prejudices and spite, and who has a Bible verse to rationalize pretty much anything she wants to do. All the characters are great, in fact, all of them feeling real without the usual “small town stock” cast. The show has been compared to Stephen King’s work, which is justifiable as we have a small town of good, plain folks encountering and seduced by a great evil, but Flanagan goes so much farther with character and theme that in my view he comes out ahead in a league entirely his own.

I could go on, the terrific horror element, the absolutely terrific bloody climax, the organic and realistic pacing, etc. Suffice to say, I thought MIDNIGHT MASS was brilliant and loved it, another example of the golden age of television we’re currently in.

My New Deal with Orbit

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I could not be happier today to announce I have signed a deal with Orbit, the speculative fiction imprint of Hachette Book Group, to publish my next horror novel, tentatively titled, EPISODE 13. This is my fourth novel with Hachette, and I’m grateful for the opportunity to work again with my awesome editor and such a great brand.

No details yet on publication date yet, but it will be available pretty much everywhere, bookstores and so on. Here’s the (rough) synopsis below. My editor loves found footage movies, so he grooved on me pitching him an epistolary novel. Can’t wait for all y’all to read this one. Stay tuned for more soon!

FADE TO BLACK … Led by husband and wife team Matt and Claire Kirklin, it’s the new hit ghost-hunting reality TV show.

Episode 13 will take them to their holy grail, the former home of the Paranormal Research Foundation. In this crumbling, derelict mansion, they hope to investigate a haunting while uncovering clues about the bizarre experiments that took place there in the 1970s.

Using scientific techniques and high-tech gear, their search for the supernatural will turn up far more than they imagined—a dark secret that will change their understanding of the very nature of reality.

Told in tapes, journals, correspondence, and files, this is the story of Episode 13.

FORTITUDE, Season 1

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In the British crime/bio thriller drama FORTITUDE, the residents of a small town confront a violent crime in their midst, while the melting permafrost produces something far more horrifying. This is a weird series, part crime procedural, part melodrama, part medical thriller, part WTF am I watching and why am I watching it. In short, I had a complicated relationship with it.

Welcome to Fortitude, population 722, where violent crime is almost nonexistent, the locals eke out a living in the Arctic wilderness, everybody walks around armed in case of polar bears, and a startling percentage of the population is good looking. When children discover a fossil exposed by the melting permafrost, it produces a bizarre murder and a strange disease. The sheriff must try to contain and resolve the bizarre murders, while a police inspector from London (played with the usual high acumen by the great Stanley Tucci) arrives to dig into the old wound of an even older murder.

What a ride. I came into it expecting a bio thriller, based on what I’d heard, and instead for the first episodes we’re thrown headfirst into a police procedural that by the end becomes a bio thriller. From the get-go, Fortitude, which has never known violent crime, starts racking up what will become by the end an almost comedic number of murders and brutal assaults over its roughly 13 hours of runtime. At various points, it seemed the show didn’t know what it wanted to be, so it threw all the spaghetti against the wall, sometimes straight into TWIN PEAKS territory. Near the end, a character sums up the theme–roughly that people sometimes do bad things for good reasons, but no matter how good the reasons, there are always consequences–which tries to lend gravitas to a show that is otherwise kinda bonkers, and is belied by the fact almost none of the violent crime in the show is actually punished.

There’s a lot to like here. The Arctic setting is absolutely fantastic, and I have to admit I’m a sucker for Arctic noir. The town and its culture appear distinct and real. The acting is terrific, led by notables like Richard Dormer, Christopher Eccleston, and Michael Gambon. There’s plenty of intrigue, the police procedural plotline led by Tucci works, and the bio thriller element is pretty cool. There are plenty of places where I was thinking, okay, this is cooking with gas now, and then the show would detour into wacky melodrama and numerous subplots that didn’t really go anywhere.

So overall, I have no regrets, though I’m not sure I would recommend it, as it’s one of the most YMMV things I’ve ever watched.

PRISONERS OF THE GHOSTLAND (2021)

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In PRISONERS OF THE GHOSTLAND (2021), a lot of great gonzo elements come together not unlike spaghetti against the wall, but the whole didn’t quite gel for me.

I was really excited about this one for several reasons. First off, the trailer is off the hook, promising a great gonzo experience that its director, Sion Sono, is apparently known for. It stars Nicolas Cage, Sofia Boutella, and Bill Moseley. And it’s produced by XYZ Films, which has a solid track record.

At first, the film delivers on its promise of utter weirdness with great production quality. The governor (Moseley) rules Samurai Town, a settlement in a region of Japan abandoned after a nuclear power plant disaster. He keeps a harem of women, including Bernice (Boutella), who escaped into the Ghostland, where refugee outcasts eke out a meager living in the apocalyptic ruins, caught between life and death. Enter Hero (Cage), a notorious criminal, whom the governor fits with an explosive suit and sends out into the Ghostland to bring his Bernice back.

Samurai Town is a mashup of samurai and American Old West culture, and there’s enough weirdness to it that it’s all very promising. The costumes and artistry apparent in the cinematography, costumes, and weird apocalyptic culture come across as something Terry Gilliam might have made.

Unfortunately, it all kind of falls apart with an over reliance on these elements at the expense of good pacing, plotting, and character development. As a result, I was surprisingly bored for much of it. Now, when you’re doing a gonzo film, you can skimp on anything and break any rules you want, but it has to come together with a certain magic. For me, it just wasn’t there. The director seemed to fall in love with certain elements and pushed them too far until they almost became grating, rather than letting me react with a sense of wonder.

So overall, PRISONERS OF THE GHOSTLAND offered a lot for me to like in the parts but nothing I fell in love with in the whole, which was a bit of a bummer as I really wanted to love it and I went into it with high hopes. Still, it checks many of the boxes of an enduring cult film, so time will tell on that.

THE SLEEP EXPERIMENT by Jeremy Bates

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THE SLEEP EXPERIMENT by Jeremy Bates provides a sensationalistic retelling of the notorious urban legend about the Sleep Experiment in the Soviet Union, in which political prisoners were offered their freedom if they stayed awake for fourteen days, only to revert to murder, mutilation, and madness. The book is fun if a bit (intentionally) over the top.

In Bates’s story, Dr. Roy Wallis, a wealthy playboy psychology professor at UC Berkeley, sets out to recreate the experiment on two test subjects, aided by two assistants. The experiment becomes a nightmare nobody could have imagined–beyond Wallis himself, who has an ulterior research goal he wants to prove.

What I liked: The characterizations are strong across the board, from Wallis to his two assistants to the Australian backpackers who signed up to take part in the experiment. Bates does a great job balancing fascinating exposition about the still poorly understood phenomenon of sleep with thriller/horror elements and titillating sexual chemistry between some of the players. When things go wrong, the horror element achieves a satisfying if conventional gross out. Overall, the novel promises a sensational and titillating story about a sleep experiment, and you get it.

What didn’t quite work for me: Wallis’s characterization pivots as the plot requires, resulting in a forced quality as the tension builds, with plenty of scenes about problems that could have been easily avoided (which also included his congested love life). For me, the climax reaches for a good gross out and offers a decent twist reveal, but I wish it had been a little more startling. Overall, Bates made good choices to advance the story and bring it home, but as I’m so familiar with the original urban legend, I think I was expecting something more surprising.

Overall, this book was a lot of fun. THE SLEEP EXPERIMENT is surprisingly smart, a simple mad scientist story told in a titillating package.

LEVIATHAN WAKES by James S.A. Corey

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I love the TV series THE EXPANSE but hadn’t read the books by James SA Corey (the pen name for writing team Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck), which are pretty hefty space opera tomes. I finally gave the first a try and wow! It’s one of those rare cases where I absolutely loved the adaptation but ended up loving the book far more. The book LEVIATHAN WAKES, adapted as the show’s first season, is similar but different enough to offer an entirely new experience.

If you’re not familiar with the books or the show, the series is set in a future where humanity has colonized the solar system, resulting in three distinct cultures and power blocs: Earth, Mars, and the Outer Planets Alliance. Jim Holden, XO of an ice miner on a run from Saturn’s rings to the asteroid belt, responds with a small shuttle crew to an SOS signal from a derelict spacecraft. This sets in motion Holden and his crew’s pursuit of a conspiracy involving alien life. The key to everything, meanwhile, may be a girl that a detective on Ceres is tracking as a missing person.

The writing here is almost perfect, like reading George R.R. Martin without any sag in the pacing. The world building is particularly impressive, delivering a lived-in sci-fi universe that places familiar human nature out into the cosmos. This universe, however, blends perfectly with the storytelling, presenting problems without getting in the way or slowing the story down with info dumps.

Then there’s the characterizations and dialogue, which are fantastic. Every character is distinctive and likeable, which is essential for an ensemble space opera, and their dialogue is as pitch perfect as anything you’d find in GAME OF THRONES.

Okay, this isn’t so much a review as a love letter, but I’m just giving credit where it’s due. Now on to the second book.