THE LEGEND OF THE SEVEN GOLDEN VAMPIRES

THE LEGEND OF THE SEVEN GOLDEN VAMPIRES (1974). Dir: Roy Ward Baker. Starring Peter Cushing, Robin Stewart, Julie Ege, David Chiang

It’s no secret that I have a fondness for some of the more esoteric outposts of British horror cinema. In previous posts I have waxed lyrically about the joys of such films as Psychomania, Frankenstein Must Be Destroyed, Dr Jekyll & Sister Hyde and (of course) Captain Kronos – Vampire Hunter.

But one film stands head and shoulders above this frankly rather odd cinematic collection – The Legend of the Seven Golden Vampires, "the world's first kung-fu horror spectacular".

With the fortunes of Hammer Films on the wane in the early 1970’s the studio sought new and ever more bizarre ways to attract audiences. There were lesbian vampires (Lust For a Vampire, The Vampire Lovers, Twins of Evil) gender-bending adaptations (Dr Jekyll & Sister Hyde), updates of the Dracula story (Dracula AD 1972, The Satanic Rites of Dracula) and, not least, the cross cultural/ cross genre extravaganza that is The Legend of the Seven Golden Vampires.

A Hammer/ Shaw Brothers co-production, The Legend of the Seven Golden Vampires has Count Dracula (played here by John Forbes Robertson since, by this stage, Christopher Lee was thoroughly sick of the role) making his way to China in the body of vampire priest Kah to take over as head of a vampire cult.

Inconveniently for him, but conveniently for the plot, his old adversary Professor Van Helsing (Peter Cushing) just happens to be lecturing in China on the subject of the vampire and his kith and kin. Before you can say ‘expedition to find the vampires’ an expedition is organized to find the vampires as Professor Van Helsing, his son, assorted martial arts experts and the rather pneumatic Julie Ege set off to investigate the cult and its legends.

Cue some high octane fight scenes, some eerily slow motion vampires, a culture clash like no other, good conquering evil and everyone home in time for tea.

To be brutal, The Legend of the Seven Golden Vampires is very silly and its blend of martial arts, genteel English gothic and Rider Haggardesque adventure never really gels but nonetheless the film has much to recommend it.

Taken out of its usual ‘back lot at Elstree’ surroundings, the Hong Kong locations give the film a much different look from the Mittel Europa so beloved of Hammer, the Golden Vampires and their zombielike minions are effective villains and their slow motion attacks (reminiscent of Amando de Ossorio's Blind Knights Templar) are rather unsettling. Added to this are the talents of director Roy Ward Baker (a man more than capable of turning a sow’s ear into a rather silky purse), Hong Kong action star David Chiang in fine 'chopping them up and chopping them down' form and, of course, the great Peter Cushing who refuses to treat the film with anything less than his usual professionalism and who provides the whole thing with a solid and dependable anchor.

On the negative side is poor John Forbes Robertson as Dracula, saddled with an atrocious make-up job that makes him look less like the Prince of Darkness and more like a panto dame (and let’s face it, Christopher Lee’s shoes were always going to be hard to fill). Lackluster supporting performances from Julie Ege – really just in the film for set decoration – and Robin Stewart as Leyland Van Helsing don't help either.

On the whole, however, The Legend of the Seven Golden Vampires is quite good fun, with its mildly exotic locations, top-notch fight scenes in classic Shaw Brothers style and some deft directorial touches from Roy Ward Baker.

It was never going to save Hammer or revitalize their creative output, but The Legend of the Seven Golden Vampires is a delightfully bonkers example of British fantasy cinema and most certainly the sort of thing that would never be made these days.

THE DREAM OF X

The Dream of X by William Hope Hodgson

In terms of apocalyptic vision, there are few novels that can match the sheer imaginative and doom laden power of William Hope Hodgson’s 1912 novel The Night Land.

Set in a far flung future where the sun has ceased to shine and the last few million humans are huddled in two vast pyramids – The Great and Lesser Redoubts – it is a world where, to paraphrase Hodgson, olden sciences have disturbed the Outward Powers and allowed grotesque and horrible, Creatures, Monsters and Ab-Humans to either materialize or develop upon the sunless world and for “certain dreadful Forces to have power to affect the life of the human spirit.”

Briefly, the plot of The Night Land concerns an unnamed narrator who, in his dreams, travels from his present into the far flung future in search of his long-lost love who, like him, has been reincarnated at the end of the world. When the Lesser Redoubt is overwhelmed by dreadful forces he elects to travel from the Great to the Lesser Redoubt to rescue her. As a plot devise this allows Hodgson to explore his strange new world in detail and bring its horrors ever closer to the fore in much the same way that they draw ever closer to the Great Redoubt.

In it depiction of a hostile and uncanny earth, The Night Land has few peers amongst dying earth fiction - here there is none of the baroque romanticism of Jack Vance or the sense of the end of the world as playground in Moorcock’s Dancers at End of Time sequence - only Clark Ashton Smith’s Zothique stories come close to matching Hodgson’s bleak vision of Earth’s final years. But even Smith’s macabre sensibility hardly matches the overwhelming horrors of Hodgson’s Night Land.

Here the great creatures of the earth – the Watchers – are not gods but malevolent, barely understood, entities, and even the lesser creatures The Silent Ones, Night Hounds and Beast Men are at best ambivalent and more usually downright hostile to the inhabitants of the Redoubts, their destructive force only kept in check by an ever dwindling Earth Current.

But…

For all its brilliance The Night Land is not an easy novel. Hodgson’s chosen style, a sort of cod gothic, is often impenetrable and at its heart the novel has a cloying sentimentality that, in its own way, is as horrific (albeit unintentionally) as any of Hodgson’s other concepts.

“And as the Dead went upwards, there was a very great Silence over all the miles of the Country of Silence. But in a little while there came from afar off, a sound as of a wind wailing; and it came onwards out of the distance, and passed over the Hills of the Babes, which were a great way off. And so came anigh to the place where I stood. Even as the blowing of a sorrowful wind did it come; and I knew that all the great multitudes did sing quietly; and the singing passed onwards, and left behind it an utter silence; even as the wind doth rustle the corn, and pass onwards, and all fall to a greater seeming quietness than before.”

The Night Land is a long novel – nearly 200,000 words long, in fact – and is an often frustrating read. Whereas the gothic sensibilities and wordiness of, say, Charles Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer or Matthew Lewis’ The Monk, are fundamental to the novels themselves, the prose style of The Night Land merely serves to create a barrier between novel and reader.

A masterpiece, certainly, but a deeply and critically flawed one.

However, as chance would have it, there is another more accessible version of The Night Land which retains all its power and startling imagery but is, quite simply, easier to read.

When The Night Land was first published a British writer could not be copyrighted in the United States unless typeset and printing were performed by an American shop. In order to secure his own copyright, Hodgson rewrote, revised and reorganised his massive opus into a much condensed form, cutting the original from nearly 200,000 to some 20.000 words, and had the edition published in the USA under the title of The Dream of X. (or, more accurately, as part of a small anthology entitled Poems & The Dream of X which contained a number of Hodgson’s poems and a further novella, Mutiny).

The restructured novel - purported to be the rescued fragments of a manuscript recovered from the ashes of a fire in the narrator’s house - is a no less remarkable piece of work than The Night Land itself, stripping the story back to its bare bones and allowing its imaginative power to shine.

Although the language is still dense and sometimes difficult, it nonetheless seems more appropriate here, almost as if cod gothic has become the language of the future and the horrors of the Night Land itself are more immediate when the novel has been shorn of its more meandering aspects. So what had once been a flawed masterpiece suddenly became a condensed masterpiece that retained its original power but now welcomed readers in rather than holding them at arms length.

Rediscovered and republished in 1977 with an introduction by the legendary Sam Sam Moskowitz and with superb illustrations by Stephen Fabian (which are almost worth the price of the book in themselves) The Dream of X is something of a lost classic but one that deserves to sit on the shelves of any SF and F aficionado.

If you have the time, patience and stamina, I would heartily recommend The Night Land in all its flawed glory (sure, it’s a difficult book but one that rewards perseverance) however, if you simply want an imaginative tour-de-force then you should make The Dream of X your next fictional stop.

HOW MANY DRAFTS?

Some writers work quickly, some work slowly. On occasion, I do both.

Very often, the first 1,000 - 1,500 words of a story come rapidly to me, a flow of images and situations – what I like to refer to as the ‘launch pad’ scenes – but the inevitable moment arrives when that initial outpouring stops. Sometimes it slows to a trickle, at other times it halts dead in its tracks. Which is when I reach the ‘what the hell happens now?’ moment and have to start thinking about back story and the ‘six serving men’ that Kipling spoke of : "I keep six honest serving-men/ (They taught me all I knew);/ Their names are What and Why and When And How and Where and Who." )

Depending on the story in question and how deeply I have thought about its structure, character motivations and conclusions the next stage of writing can also come either rapidly or slowly (slowly more often, to be honest) until I reach the moment when I can safely write the words The End.

It’s rare, however, that those words actually mark the end of the writing process. In reality, they simply mark the moment when I have to go back, take the story apart and begin to rebuild it. There is a wonderful nugget of advice in Stephen King’s book On Writing (actually, there are many wonderful nuggets of advice in that particular book) given to him by Algis Budrys (I think) that ‘second draft equals first draft minus 10%’. It’s a good rule, akin to ‘murder your darlings’, and one that gets a writer thinking about what is absolutely necessary in the story.

Of course, it’s up to the individual writer to determine exactly what is necessary and what isn’t. With me, imagery and mood are just as important as the movement of plot – particularly since, as Robert Heinlein once noted, there are only a strictly limited number of plots in the world anyway (somewhere between 3 and 36 depending upon who you listen to). But even within those parameters, the right images are important, the right mood is paramount, or to put it another way, it’s about finding the right words for the story.

The business of drafting a story is, for me, a continuous process, and can sometimes run to as many as six or seven drafts depending on the story and what I am trying to achieve with it. With short fiction every word is precious and every word needs to fulfill its function, whether is sets a scene, a mood, describes a character or his/her actions, or simply gets the character(s) from point A to point B in the narrative.

Of course, there are as many different ways to write a story as there are writers to do it and no method is necessarily better than another, but I think that the real importance of redrafting is getting the writer to think about the story and the words that he has placed upon the page. Even if you are eager to move on to the next story and to tell your next tale (always a good thing, I feel, since if you aren’t excited by your work then how an you expect anyone else to be) it’s always worth it to take time over your work and make sure that everything fits together the way it should and the way you want it to.

THE PHANTOM TOLLBOOTH

The Phantom Tollbooth by Norton Juster

“There was once a boy named Milo who didn’t know what to do with himself – not just sometimes, but always.” So begins Norton Juster’s wonderful book The Phantom Tollbooth, a tale of adventure, words, numbers and, above all, the joy, frustration and sometimes sheer bafflement of education.

When Milo receives a mysterious present – the phantom tollbooth of the title – it leads him and his little electric car into the Kingdom of Wisdom where he meets amongst others Tock the Watchdog, the Humbug, The Spelling Bee (s-p-e-l-l-i-n-g) King Azaz the Unabridged of Dictionopolis and the Mathemagician of Digitopolis.

You see, the Kingdom of Wisdom is in turmoil since the Princesses Rhyme and Reason were banished to the Castle In the Air and it's up to Milo, assisted by Tock and sometimes hindered by the Humbug, to bring them back so that harmony can be restored.

What follows is a series of colourful and clever adventures as Milo attempts to complete his quest – his meeting with the world’s smallest giant, the world’s tallest midget, the world’s fattest thin man and the world’s thinnest fat man (all of whom just happen to be the same person), a trip to the Island of Conclusions (which you can only get to by jumping) Dr Dischord and the awful DYNNE and ultimately a trip to the Mountains of Ignorance and a meeting with its terrible demons (including the Triple Demons of Compromise – one tall and thin, one short and fat and the third exactly like the other two).

First published in 1961, The Phantom Tollbooth has along since been acknowledged as a children’s classic – a book to rank along Alice in Wonderland or Watership Down in terms of its wit, invention and steadfast refusal to talk down to its readership.

I confess that I have only read it quite recently (which is a shocking oversight on my behalf) and was totally captivated by The Phantom Tollbooth. There are moments of genuine terror for young Milo as well as moments of sheer joy and utter hilarity. Norton Juster’s delight in both words and numbers is never less than infectious and his boundless imagination takes everyday things and phrases and breathes gloriously new literary life into them: the banquet where everyone literally eats their own words, the not-so-wicked Which and the aforementioned awful DYNNE are just some of the delights awaiting readers both old and young.

One of the joys of good children’s literature is its ability to reach across the generations, something that The Phantom Tollbooth manages with deceptive ease. If you’ve never read it, read it now, if you’ve read it before, read it again. Your smile will thank you.

CHARLES R. SAUNDERS INTERVIEWED

Innsmouth Free Press (a very fine ezine of fiction in a Lovecraftain vein) has a brand new interview with Charles R. Saunders - author of the Imaro and Dossouye novels - in its current issue.

Among other things, Charles discusses Imaro, Dossouye, his influences, the state of modern fantasy and talks a little about his plans for future fiction.

Well worth checking out.

http://www.innsmouthfreepress.com/?p=4965

CANDIDE

Candide by Voltaire

Not exactly SF – or even proto-SF – Candide is nevertheless a work of imaginative fiction the equal of any that might sit on a SF reader or writer’s shelf.

Filled with bizarre characters and situations and, even after some 250 years, uproariously funny, Candide has provided the template for many a literary odyssey through strange worlds.

When Candide is exiled from the cosy world of castle Thunder-ten-Tronckh for daring to fall in love with the Baron’s beautiful daughter Cunégonde, life takes him on a journey that encompasses war, earthquakes, the ministrations of the Inquisition and even to the fabled utopia of El Dorado. Throughout his privations, Candide clings to the notion that human beings are basically good and happy people and that he lives in ‘the best of all possible worlds’.

First published in 1759, Candide is a short, furious novel that rarely lingers on its catalogue of battles, disasters, rapes, murders and executions. As a result – and equally as a result of its universal themes – the novel has aged remarkably well and is most certainly more modern than, say, Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764) where the density of both language and situation can be somewhat daunting for the contemporary reader.

Filled with grotesque characters - such as the philosopher Dr Pangloss ( the professor of metaphysico-theologico-cosmolo-nigology. who’s optimistic refrain of ‘best of all possible worlds’ give the novel its ironic central theme) the beautiful Cunégonde (fresh-coloured, comely, plump, and desirable), Governor Don Fernando d'Ibaraa, y Figueora, yMascarenes, y Lampourdos, y Souza (who’s ‘air of noble distain… affected accent and stilted manner made everyone long to hit him’) and Candide himself, a man who’s stoic nature moves past caricature and into the mythic.

Candide is a remarkably ribald and, at times, brutal novel. Voltaire rarely spares the reader’s sensibility when it comes to his depiction of bloodshed and disaster, nor does he flinch from portraying the self-serving nature of his characters. Indeed it is a world where good is often portrayed as foolish and virtue is punished as often (perhaps more often) than wickedness: the fate of Cunégonde (one of slavery, violence and rape), for instance, is mirrored by the fate of the old woman with one buttock (an image which is at first hilarious then increasingly sinister and tragic as the truth of her condition is revealed).

But if Candide is a novel of multifold horrors, it is leavened by Voltaire’s ability to poke fun at many nations and their societies – including the French, Germans, Portuguese, English, Spanish and Dutch – with only the inhabitants of the mythical El Dorado escaping his scathing pen relatively untouched (although, by the same token, Voltaire implies that, wonderful as it may seen, El Dorado would be the worst place on earth if seen from a different perspective.)

At its heart Candide is a love story and Candide’s single-minded pursuit of Cunégonde provides the spine of the novel and much of its impetus. With a gleeful delight in coincidence, (characters presumed dead have a habit of turning up just as and when they are required) a scathing view of science, religion and philosophy, Candide is as much tragedy as comedy, a novel who’s titular character is an all-too human innocent abroad and who’s supporting cast prefigures the larger-than-life inhabitants of Dickensian fiction and the gothic novel.

Whereas many classic novels remain firmly of their time – reflecting the social mores and ills of the time in which they were written – Candide remains as boisterous and heartbreaking as ever.

If you only read one classic French novel this year, make it Candide.

THE TOWER OF DREAMS AT ABANDONED TOWERS

My short story The Tower of Dreams is up at the very excellent Abandoned Towers. It's something of a departure from my usual doom 'n' gloom fiction and is (hopefully) rather funny.Check it out, why not? You can find it by clicking on the Fantasy link.

http://cyberwizardproductions.com/AbandonedTowers/

DAX THE WARRIOR/ DAX THE DAMNED

I’ve been reading a lot of sword and sorcery comics recently, in particular titles like Dagar the Invincible, Claw the Unconquered, Deathdealer, Red Sonja and the various Conan titles written by the great Roy Thomas. But the one that has caught my attention most is a series that first appeared in the legendary Warren comic Eerie in the early 1970’s: Dax the Warrior a.k.a Dax the Damned.

Like many sword-swinging barbarians of the time, Dax is (or was) a distant relative of Conan (the template for virtually all the s & s fiction that followed in his wake - even Elric was a sort of reverse Conan, a cultured prince who loses an empire rather than an uncouth barbarian who seizes one) but what made Dax so very different from his comic book contemporaries was the brilliant artwork from Spanish writer/ creator Esteban Maroto and the strange, almost hallucinogenic, stories in which he appeared.

Whereas the Roy Thomas Conan stories were bright, colourful adventures where might and cunning were enough to overcome even the strongest adversary, the Dax stories were doom-laden, downbeat, borderline sadistic with a fascination for beautiful, often treacherous, women characters. While Dax frequently emerged victorious his victories were often pyrrhic at best and on occasions the stories would end with Dax mired in despair or hovering on the edge of death.

The very first Dax story, which appeared in Eerie # 39, set the tone for what was to come:

Returning home from service in a bloody war, Dax spies a beautiful young woman bathing in a pool. Smitten by her, Dax dives into the water and the two become lovers in a very short space of time (regardless of his doomed status, Dax remained ever the ladies man, something that would land him in trouble time and time again). The girl, Freya, tells him that she wishes to escape from this land since it is “not the land for a love such as ours.”

Almost immediately afterwards, Dax and Freya are attacked by a monstrous winged creature and Freya is taken away. Following them, Dax comes to a cavern filled with visions of terrifying creatures tearing at human women. Upon entering he is confronted by a cloaked figure who orders him to leave the cavern forever.

Since Dax is a hero, he does not heed the warning and presses on, finally finding Freya at the mercy of a lizard-like creature whom Dax promptly slays. As he carries Freya from the cavern, the cloaked figure appears again and as Dax is about to kiss Freya warns him that she has been infected by a severe and utterly infectious form of leprosy.

The story ends with a final image of Dax with Freya in his arms – triumphant yet defeated at the same time.

In a very short space of time (about eight pages) Maroto conjures some startling images and throws up enough questions to make the reader scratch his head in wonder. It is to Maroto’s credit that the questions are never answered since the stories are very much seen from Dax’s perspective and Dax is very much a ‘slay first, slay second and, if anyone is left after that slay them’ kind of guy (and indeed, in subsequent stories, more questions about Dax and his world would emerge, never to be answered).

This is not to say that the Dax stories were either badly written or just simple barbarian adventures but rather that the obscurity of the stories give them a quality all their own, their style deeply surreal and unmistakeably European rather than American.

Over the course of a dozen stories, running from Eerie 39 – 52, Dax would encounter mad gods, vampiric witches, sirens, snake-demons and a whole host of other strange creatures with the saga finally ending on a typical downbeat note.

For issue 59 of Eerie, ten of the original twelve Dax stories were extensively re-written by Budd Lewis and the character rechristened as Dax the Damned in an attempt to give the series a little more continuity and to explain a few of the more esoteric aspects of the character and his world. The re-written Dax tales were fine (as they still retained Maroto’s wonderful art) but were robbed of much of their mystery and surrealism.

A minor addition to the world of sword and sorcery, to be sure, but Dax deserves to be remembered, if only because he is/was a surreal oasis in a genre where experimentation can be rare.

WELCOME BACK, IMARO

Imaro: The Naama War is the ‘book that was, then wasn’t, now is again’. The checkered history of the Imaro books is semi-legendary – first published by DAW in the 1980’s then by Nightshade Books a little more recently, Imaro faltered not once but twice, leaving both the character and fans of the series in limbo.

Until now.

Thanks to Sword and Soul Media, Imaro: The Naama War has finally been unleashed and it has has been well worth the wait.

For those who don’t know, Imaro is an Ilyassai warrior in Nyumbani (a brilliantly imagined and realized alternative Africa) who moves from outcast to bandit leader and, ultimately, to holding the fate of the entire continent in his hands. Comparisons with Howard and Conan are both inevitable and somewhat misleading since Imaro is much, much more than an African Conan - although fans of Howard will find much to enjoy here – and is very much his own man and, equally, so is Charles R. Saunders. A writer who is capable of both great subtlety and great action in his stories, Saunders’ muscular prose blends with very human (and in some cases inhuman) characters to create a world that is far beyond the usual cod Medieval Europe that predominates much of sword and sorcery.

Following on directly from The Trail of Bohu, The Naama War racks up the odds, pitting nation against nation, gods against gods, and, ultimately, Imaro against his nemesis/ doppelganger, Bohu. Battles, both epic and personal, are fought, a harrowing quest is undertaken, the fate of Nyumbani hangs in the balance and, in some cases, the characters find that the true cost of war is not always paid in blood.

One of Saunders’ great strengths is – like Howard and David Gemmell - his ability to create a world that is simultaneously familiar and totally different to our own. There are parallels with both Zulu and Maasai culture in the Ilyassai and Abamba nations and echoes of pre-apartheid South Africa in Naama (although Saunders’ is too subtle a writer to ever indulge in simple parallels or fictional recriminations) and the continent of Nyumbani is vividly realized and evoked.

While this isn’t the best place for new readers to start with Imaro, for fans of the series The Naama War is a delight from start to finish, answering questions that have hung in the air for nearly a quarter of a century (depending on when you first started reading Imaro, although I must confess that I am a recent convert) and delivering the sort of all-out action and utterly believable characters which have become a hallmark of both Imaro and his creator.

Where the earlier Imaro novels, in particular Imaro and Imaro 2: The Quest For Cush, were somewhat episodic in their structure (reflecting their origins in Saunders’ short fiction), The Naama War is very much a novel: epic in scope but more importantly, deeply human at its core. Saunders makes you care about his characters, both major and minor, and the plot springs from the characters never the other way round.

The Naama War is difficult to review without giving too much away – for fans of the series it is a welcome return to Nyumbani and provides an extremely satisfying end to the current saga of Imaro while laying the groundwork for a continuation of the series (and if there is any justice in the universe then we will see more Imaro stories and novels)

If you care about sword and sorcery (or just good fiction in general) the Imaro books are a must have – a unique and brilliant creation.

Welcome back, Imaro.

For more information on Imaro and his creator:

http://www.charlessaunderswriter.com/

THE PHANTOM QUEEN AWAKES

Just got word from the lovely people at Morrigan Books that their new anthology The Phantom Queen Awakes is available for pre-order. It features new fiction from Katharine Kerr, Elaine Cunningham, Anya Bast, C.E Murphy and, well, me!

Love, death and war…

The Morrigan goddess represented all three to the ancient Celts. Journey with our authors as they tell stories of love, war, hatred, revenge and mortality - each featuring the Morrigan in her many guises.

Re-visit the world of Deverry, and of Nevyn, with a previously unpublished tale by Katharine Kerr, watch the Norse gods meet their Celtic counterparts with Elaine Cunningham, meet a druid who dances for the dead with C.E. Murphy and follow the path of a Roman centurion with Anya Bast.

These are but a few offerings from the stories collection in The Phantom Queen Awakes. If you are searching for a rich blend of dark fantasy, then this is a collection perfect for you.

The Phantom Queen Awakes stories:
Rising Tide: Ruth Shelton

Kiss of the Morrigan: Anya Bast

I Guard Your Death: Lynne Lumsden

GreenGifts of the Morrigan: Donald Jacob Uitvlugt

Cairn Dancer: C. E. Murphy

Washerwoman: Jennifer Lawrence

The Raven’s Curse: Sharon Kae Reamer

Ravens: Mari Ness

The Lass from Far Away: Katharine Kerr

The Trinket: Peter Bell

The Dying Gaul: Michael Bailey

The Children of Badb Catha: James Lecky

The Plain of Pillars: L. J. Hayward

The Silver Branch: Linda Donahue

The Good and Faithful Servant: Martyn Taylor

The White Heifer of Fearchair: T. A. Moore

She Who is Becoming: Elaine Cunningham

http://www.morriganbooks.com/?p=188

PREDITORS AND EDITORS POLL

The 2010 Preditors and Editors Poll is open from now until 14 January.

It's a chance to vote for your favourite magazines and stories of 2009.

http://www.critters.org/predpoll/

Not wishing to try and sway anyone, but I'd recommend a few excellent magazines that you might like to consider: Heroic Quarterly Fantasy, Beneath Ceaseless Skies and Sorcerous Signals.

Happy voting.

http://www.critters.org/predpoll/tally.ht

SCREAM AND SCREAM AGAIN

Dir Gordon Hessler. Starring Vincent Price, Peter Cushing, Christopher Lee, Alfred Marks.

There was a period in the late 1960’s and early 1970’s when British horror films took a serious and extended trip into the weird side of things. The gothic feel of Hammer was starting to become passé and the old monsters (particularly Frankenstein and Dracula) were showing a little wear around the cinematic edges (although, ironically, some of the finest Hammer films such as Frankenstein Must Be Destroyed, The Devil Rides Out and Captain Kronos – Vampire Hunter were made around this time) even the Amicus portmanteau movies had begun to look a little moribund (although again, films like Asylum and Beyond the Grave have a lasting appeal for certain aficionados.).

As a result, the British horror film diversified in an attempt to broaden its appeal and as a result threw up quite a few oddities.

One of the strangest of them all was 1969’s Scream and Scream Again – based upon the novel The Disorientated Man by Peter Saxon - a film for which the words ‘confusing’ and ‘compelling’ hardly do justice to the wild mix of science fiction, serial killer and police procedural contained within its hour and a half of strange doings, multiple plot strands and funky fashions.

Any kind of précis would be difficult to write in a few words, but here goes:

An athlete collapses in the street during the opening credits. He awakes to find himself in a hospital bed and to discover that his limbs are being removed one by one. A blood drinking serial killer is at large, targeting young women and dispatching them in various brutal ways. Simultaneously, strange experiments are being carried out in an unnamed European country (ostensibly East Germany but closer in appearance to a black-clad fascist state) while Dr Browning (Vincent Price) is also carrying out experiments of his own in his stately mansion cum laboratory. As the police begin to realise that their killer is more than human (difficult to stop, capable of tearing his own hand off in order to escape from handcuffs) the trail finally leads to Price and his convenient tub of acid into which the killer plunges himself rather than face capture.

The plot strands finally come together to reveal that Dr Price – aided and abetted by the homicidal Konrad (Marshall Jones) - has been creating a race of superhumans of which Lugosi’s Dr Vornoff from Ed Wood’s Bride of the Monster would be justifiably proud.

The whole thing ends in a welter of acid as Price decides to destroy his creations rather than allow them to be used for evil and the viewer is left with the nagging feeling that he has just seen something so ludicrous that it is either the work of a genius or a madman.

Actually, Scream and Scream Again is a decent enough (if often confusing) potboiler and if one doesn’t think too hard about the various glaring plot holes that abound left, right and centre, it passes a decent enough ninety odd minutes. It has a mad charm all of its own and with the behind the scenes involvement of Max Rosenberg and Milton Subotsky is basically an Amicus movie masquerading under a different banner (much like Horror Hotel or the two Dr Who movies in which Cushing played the Doctor).

Although Price, Lee and Cushing are the ostensive stars of the movie, their various contributions amount to little more than extended cameos (Cushing in particular appears for just long enough to be dispatched by Konrad with a sort of Vulcan nerve pinch, while Lee’s appearance is not dissimilar to the part he would play in Death Line, as a sort of catch-all ‘Man from the Ministry’ character).

The real star of the movie is Alfred Marks, whose irascible Inspector Bellaver is one of that small but honourable group of irascible policemen who’s ranks include Donald Pleasance in Death Line and Robert Hardy in the similarly bonkers Psychomania (Marks’ brief soliloquy on the nature of a Police issue sandwich is particular fine: “Smells like cheese. Looks like ham. Oh, no problem, it’s chicken”) and there are enough familiar faces in the supporting cast to make it a fun evening of ‘what else was that guy in?’ for anyone who enjoys identifying British actors slumming it for the pay cheque.

Strange, confusing and wonderful in parts – Price in particular appears to relish his mad scientist role (although both Cushing and Lee, Lee in particular, appear to be slightly unsure as to what they are actually doing here) – Scream and Scream Again is something of a mixed bag. Not a classic by any means, but passable enough and any film that features Vincent Price, Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee in its line-up automatically becomes a must see for anyone who has an interest in British horror cinema.

And it all makes sense in the end. Sort of.

IMARO: THE NAAMA WAR

For aficionados of sword and sorcery, Charles R. Saunders is one of its great, unsung, heroes. His Imaro novels are wonderfully written, action packed fantasies set in a mythical Africa.

The long-awaited fourth Imaro novel Imaro: The Naama War is currently available from Saunders’ own Sword and Soul Media.

"Warfare on a cataclysmic scale is convulsing the continent of Nyumbani from north to south. Soldiers fall. Cities burn. Blood reddens the sea. Sorcery sears the land. Deities gather in opposite dimensions, poised to unleash unimaginable cosmic power on a land already battered by the conflict between the Cushites of the north and the Naamans of the south.In the midst of this massive struggle, Imaro, warrior of the Ilyassai, wages a personal war against his nemesis, the sorcerer Bohu of Naama. This individual vendetta mirrors the larger clash between the forces of good and evil – a confrontation that threatens to tear Nyumbani apart. The destiny for which Imaro has been honed like a living weapon now lies directly before him. Imaro vs. Bohu. Cush vs. Naama. War. Magic. Blood. Fire. The losers in this wide-ranging battle for the fate of a continent face oblivion. But the winners will not emerge unscathed."

If it’s anything like the other novels in the series, it should be brilliant.

You can order it here: http://www.lulu.com/product/101/imaro-the-naama-war/6196467

INFECTED AT GOLDEN VISIONS

Another bit of New Year Cheer. My short story Infected is currently up and available to read at Golden Visions (about half way down the page):

http://www.goldenvisionsmagazine.biz/January-2010-Flashes.html

THE TOWER OF DREAMS AT ABANDONED TOWERS

“If there is one thing I learn from a life of magic it is never trust a hobgoblin.”

Just got word from Abandoned Towers that my short story The Tower of Dreams has been accepted for publication later this year (a decent enough start to 2010, says I).

I’m rather pleased about this for a number of reasons. Firstly, because Abandoned Towers is an excellent market and, secondly, because the story marks something of a departure for me in fictional terms.

I’ve long been a fan of the brilliant Damon Runyon and his stories of the colourful denizens of Broadway and equally I’ve always been a fan of Robert Bloch, who produced some of the finest genre fiction of the twentieth century. Bloch and Runyon had something of a collision in Bloch’s Lefty Feep stories, written when Bloch was suffering from a minor creative drought. Doggedly told in the first person present tense, the Left Feep stories are a hoot from start to finish and pay an affectionate homage to Runyon and his work.

The Tower of Dreams is my own homage to both Damon Runyan and Robert Bloch, working on the principle that if doing something very, very different could help to lift the great Robert Bloch out of a creative dip, then it might just do the very same for me.

The vast majority of my fictional output is somewhat gloomy, to say the least (strangely, since I am an optimistic and fairly upbeat person generally speaking) so the chance to do something a little lighter and (hopefully) funny, was a welcome change of pace.

I enjoyed writing it and, with a little luck, people may enjoy reading it, too.

Here’s to a creative and prosperous New Year to one and all.

http://cyberwizardproductions.com/AbandonedTowers/