Fireflies by Lacey Reah (2011)

Lacey Reah's Fireflies opens with the narrator, Linda, walking through Central Park, captivated by the fireflies that come out at night. There she is willingly seduced and transformed by a vampire-like creature known as a nymphomite.

The book gets off to a quick start, and from the Central Park scene jumps right into Linda's new life as a nyphomite. These creatures drink blood from their victims, but can only properly feed if the victim is in the throes of an orgasm at the moment of feeding.

Linda holds no grudge against the creature that changed her; she doesn't, in fact, hold onto any kind of nostalgia for her life as a human, and goes through a nightly routine of hunting, seducing, and feeding, and she is, if not happy, at least occupied.

This changes when she meets, and transforms, a woman named Jesse, who subsequently lashes out at her, condemning her for turning her into a nyphomite, instead of simply killing her. For the first time since being changed, Linda feels something human within her, and is forced to contemplate what she left behind in her first life.

Reah keeps the action moving along at a fast pace, while exploring the various moods and emotions Linda struggles with in her new form. It's about halfway into the 95-page book that Linda is confronted with Jesse and what she's done to her. Soon, the complacent but active character we've been with for the first fifty pages transforms, and what we have is a wounded, suddenly regretful vampire, who even takes a shot at going home, knowing there's no future for her there.

It isn't easy to make a sympathetic character out of someone who happily sucks the blood out of anybody who looks like easy prey, but Reah pulls it off pretty well. Linda is pretty much doomed from the beginning, and by the second half of the story, you wish there was some way out for her, despite her easy adoption of her new bloody appetite.

Fireflies is available in paperback and e-book formats, and can be purchased at the folowing links. The Lacey Reah/Fireflies myspace address is listed below.

http://www.amazon.com/Fireflies-Lacey-Reah/dp/145028163X
http://search.barnesandnoble.com/Fireflies/Lacey-Reah/e/9781450281638/?itm=1&USRI=lacey+reah+fireflies

http://www.myspace.com/lindafireflies

Horror Film Director Feature #2: Mick Garris

Known for his Stephen King adaptations, and for creating the impressive Showtime Masters of Horror (2005-2007) series, Mick Garris has been working in television and film for about thirty years, as a writer, producer, and director.

His first horror feature was Critters 2 (1988), and Garris has been working steadily in the genre ever since. I'm not sure how many people would care enough to argue, but I'm going to go ahead and say that Critters 2 is the best of that series. Expanding upon the first in nearly every way, the outerspace-bred Krites move past the farmhouse they first terrorized, and this time take on the entire town, during Easter. The action culminates with an enormous "Critter Ball," made up of hundreds of the little bastards, rolling over townsfolk, immediately shredding their skin, turning them into skeletons (there's a good deal more blood in this movie than you can get away with in a modern PG-13-rated film).

For my money, Critters 2 is as good as it gets, far as horror-comedy B movies go.
Garris followed that one up two years later, with the TV movie Psycho IV: The Beginning. Not exactly a career highlight, but not a bad film. Another two years, and Garris came out with Sleepwalkers, his first Stephen King adaptation (based on a King-written screenplay). A crazy story about incestuous mother and son shapeshifters.

He got a good deal of shit from horror (and Kubrick) fans for his update of The Shining (1997). I'd argue, though, that the faults with the second movie version of King's novel, lie mostly in the screenplay, written by the author, which sticks very close to his book but never quite builds tension the way Kubrick's film did.

There's more agreement on his 1994 TV movie The Stand. I never could get into this one, both before and after reading the novel. It's hard to say exactly what it is about it that I don't like, except to say that in every scene, it feels like I'm watching television. There are moments in Tommy Lee Wallace's TV adaptation of It that make you forget you're watching network television. I'd say the same for Garris's Quicksilver Highway and Desperation (2006), but The Stand always looks and feels like it needs a bigger budget, and some of the acting and dialogue is pretty limp.

But the movie does have its admirers, a pretty big fanbase actually, and is by no means a bad film. I just wouldn't suggest it as a good example of Garris's best work.

One of his more curious adaptations is the under-appreciated TV movie Quicksilver Highway (1997), which features two forty-minute stories, one an adaptation of Clive Barker's short story, "The Body Politic," the other based on King's short story, "Chattery Teeth." Both stories are representative of each writer's best short form material, and Garris's film is worthy of the source material. The first half deals with a man whose hand has suddenly become possessed, and the second with novelty store chattery teeth attacking a menacing hitchhiker.

Masters of Horror was a good series, and in addition to holding a "created by" credit, Garris has directed a couple episodes himself. Check out Valerie On the Stairs. It's available on Netflix Instant View. Garris followed this up with the network television series Fear Itself. From the little I saw of that show, it didn't seem to capture the energy of Masters of Horror (2008-2009), but when you start trying to combine horror and the three-letter companies, ABC, NBC, CBS . . . it probably isn't destined to work out.

I'd like to see him get back to something with a bit of humor in it. Critters 2 and Quicksilver Highway stand as two of his best works, and while Garris's later work has its share of great moments, some dark comedy might be in order.

Maybe something to top that giant Critter Ball?

Garris is currently in production on an adaptation Stephen King's Bag of Bones as a television series. Look for that later this year.

Miscellany: An Epic Memoir of Hooah

I lost count pretty quickly of how many times David Bellavia used the word "hooah" in his memoir of the 2004 Battle of Fallujah in Iraq titled House to House (2007).  While I'm usually averse to the gung-ho patriotism and relish of ultra-violence Bellavia brought to his account of this and other battles in the early years of the Iraq War, his streamlined narrative approach to infantry combat is more palpable than any piece of political war writing has ever been.  Maybe it's because, when you get down to it, Bellavia is not interested in the politics of the war.  He's interested in the hell it causes on the ground, and the moments of insanity it evokes in its participants.  At one point Bellavia realizes, in order to defeat the fanatics in his crosshairs, he must become a fanatic himself, whether it’s for a Christian god or for his brothers-in-arms.  Sounds like a Children’s Crusade to me, especially since many of the men under Bellavia command aren’t old enough to drink legally back home in the States.  Gives you something to think about.

But perhaps the biggest revelation, for me, in House to House, is Michael Ware, an Australian journalist who embedded with Bellavia’s unit during their operation in Fallujah.  I thought Ware’s breed of dead-set adventure journalists had died out in Vietnam.  Ware’s journalism isn’t as morally ambiguous and hardnosed as I’d like, (I think you might still have to go back to Vietnam correspondents for that) but he evokes the action on the ground better than anyone else I’ve read.

From Into the Hot Zone, Time Magazine, Monday, November 22, 2004

“Within the Bradley's cramped and musty hold, the shock of the minesweeper's explosion was felt by the infantrymen huddled inside. Among them is Fitts, a lithe, expressive Mississippian and father of three who joined the military eight years ago. He warns his team to "get ready to get out of this big metal bitch." With the bulk of the Marine-led assault force poised on the northern side of the railway, 3rd Platoon plowed forward, bringing its Bradleys to a halt beneath Fallujah's first houses. The platoon radio net crackled, "Drop ramp. All 3rd Platoon elements drop ramp, drop ramp." And with that, the ground battle began.”

Related Links:

1. An Archive of Michael Ware's Reportage

2. Hot Air Interview with Bellavia

3. NPR Piece on Military Memoirs

Saga of the Swamp Thing, Book One – (1983-1984)

Writer:  Alan Moore

Artists: Stephen Bissette and John Totleben

My only exposure to Swamp Thing, before reading this first collection of Alan Moore’s famed run on the DC comic starting in 1983, was the 1982 Wes Craven film.  Images of Dick Duron tramping around the Virginia jungle in a rigid plastic monster suit saving a sweaty Adrienne Barbeau from falling out of her torn white top reinforced my prejudice of a trashy comic book conceit only a step or two above the ludicrous Toxic Avenger.  Little did I know that Moore was able to take an aging character (Swamp Thing was created in 1970 by Len Wein and Berni Wrightson) as far away from Troma stupidity as the comic book medium would allow.  While Saga of the Swamp Thing is a piece of horror fiction and therefore subject to the strange flights of fantasy only edible with a healthy dose of suspended disbelief, Moore’s integration of the plot into the fibers of his characters makes reading Saga a powerful delight nearly thirty years after it was created.  Ramsey Campbell, in his introduction to the 2000 edition of the collection, writes, “Here as elsewhere, Moore’s language and imagery is simultaneously comic and horrifying, as is the way with horror fiction.  Horror fiction at its best is in the business of pushing back the barriers, of risking the absurd in order to reach the sublime, just as Jason Woodrue does by eating a tuber of Swamp Thing’s.  By this stage no reader can doubt that here is a story prepared to go to the end of itself, whatever it may find there or on the way.”

Closer in content and aim to Watchmen than Moore’s later work in The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Moore’s run on Saga (which began with issue # 20) starts with a gritty paranoid vision of the military exploiting the Swamp Thing and the monster realizing his place in the world is shrinking.  Through the research of Dr. Jason Woodrue, the Floronic Man, we see the true nature of the Swamp Thing in the brilliant issue # 21, The Anatomy Lesson.  The Swamp Thing is not, as was believed before Moore’s tenure on the book, a reincarnated and plant-reinforced Dr. Alec Holland, but a completely vegetable entity that thinks it’s Alec Holland.  What’s so thrilling is Moore’s ability to make such a strange and unbelievable conceit so emotionally and ecologically devastating.  It’s nice to see Moore use his considerable storytelling talents to tell such a gritty, anti-capitalist tale of environmental rage.  The Floronic Man’s hatred for mankind manifests as a raging terrorism, a hypocritical stance that could only be taken by someone who was originally human.  Here, only the Swamp Thing truly speaks and acts for the benefit of the planet.  Even a later enemy, Satan himself, manifests to the Swamp Thing and his world as an ecological condition – autumn.  The creature’s ability to reason in a moral fashion wins out over his pure physical prowess, which is almost never employed.  He’s a Frankenstein’s monster who knows restraint, who shows readers the kindness and compassion manifest in the grotesque.

Bissette and Totleben created a dark, restrained look for the book.  Their influence is seen in later 80s books such as Sandman and then pops up again in some of the quirkier titles in the 90s.  I can’t imagine Sam Kieth’s dreamlike The Maxx without the precedent of Bissette and Totleben’s Saga books.  Their panels flow organically through the story, and they never worry about wasting space for the emotional tableaux so necessary to create a superhero comic which can be enjoyed on levels other than muscle and breast worship.  In a particularly memorable series of pages, the Swamp Thing chases a billionaire industrialist through a vast office complex, while Dr. Jason Woodrue narrates the set piece he has orchestrated.  “And will there be blood?  I don’t know.  I don’t know if there will be blood.  It isn’t important.  It won’t spoil things if there is no blood.  The blood doesn’t matter.  Just the dying.  The dying’s all that matters.”  You’ve got to see these pages to believe the power of Moore paired with Bissette and Totleben.  They created a pop-art language that is much underused, even in today’s glutted comic book market.

While the environmental message of Saga of the Swamp Thing can easily be overstated, it should not be neglected.  Like other late-70s and early-80s American art, Saga tackles the excesses of an empire reaching its manifest destiny – to exploit not only the natural resources of its land, but the very fabric of nature, the forces of the universe.

Related Links:

1. Grovel Review

2. Pads and Panels Review

3. Wired Review

4. IGN Review

5. Blather Alan Moore Interview

Nice Jacket: Dispatches

*The Picador Paperback edition of Michael Herr’s 1977 book Dispatches.

This cover reminds me of M*A*S*H.  In both, a weird brand of 70s minimalism flavors the apocalypse with humor and whimsy.  The saturated green helmet with its slogan ‘HELL SUCKS’ and a teardrop peace sign in vivid yellow, nestles in a hyperbolic (but mostly true) blurb from John Le Carré.  It’s certainly the best book I’ve ever read on men and war in any time, but then again I haven’t read many true war narratives. 

When I hold this book in my hand, I can see the yellow of the passing years on the white cover, the thumbprints of everyone who has picked it up over the years shining in the light.  It feels like a cheaply-made, but beautiful communiqué, delivered personally by a friend.

When you get down to it though, Dispatches, isn’t much of a narrative.  It’s more a patchwork of impressions.  Herr uses an erratic, stream-of-consciousness style.  He’s a straight, war-hardened Hunter S. Thompson with big balls and a bigger heart.  His reports stick close to the dirt as he follows the lowest ranks of the most active units in the marines.  He’d rather tell us what the stoned grunts are talking about than the generals or the intelligence agencies.  Herr’s Vietnam War is in no way romanticized.  He refrains from the easy exoticism of Hollywood’s Vietnam films like Platoon and Apocalypse Now.  There are no easy political answers like you might find in Peter Davis’s powerful documentary Hearts and Minds.

Herr’s gift is the ability to show the horror and madness of war without any bloviating rhetoric, just the facts and the action of it all.  He shows most of the men in a human light, which is what they deserve, no matter the atrocities some of them participated in.  Herr’s strongest moment is his long description of the press in Vietnam.  The journalist’s odd hypocritical stance and parasitic nature is set into stunning relief against a war most of them objected to.

Dexter Filkins accomplished something similar for the Iraq War in his brilliant 2008 book The Forever War, but some of the resistant glamour of the journalist has been lost in the intervening 40 years.  The alienation is stronger in Iraq, it seems, and perhaps the disinterest of civilians back home has helped make the Armed Forces more callous.  Let the draft be reinstituted and see how oblivious we remain.

Related Links:

1. The American Scholar Essay on Dispatches

2. The Massachusetts Review Essay on Dispatches

3. New York Times Review of Herr's book on Kubrick

My Brain is Hanging Upside Down by David Heatley (2008)

The first of David Heatley’s stories I read was part of an anthology published about four or five years ago.  I can’t remember if it was one of those Best American Comics books or the hardbound issue of McSweeney’s filled with indie comics.  One thing I do remember is what the story was about.  In a few sloppy panels, Heatley told about living with his father after college, sitting on the toilet and wondering what it looks like when he wipes his ass after pooping.  Not all of us wonder what this looks like, but I’m sure more of us wonder than would admit it, and Heatley’s honesty immediately struck me as both hilarious and heartbreaking.

In his 2008 full-length graphic memoir My Brain is Hanging Upside Down, Heatley brings this intimate and odd tone to broader subjects.  Whether he’s showing us a record of every woman and man he’s had even the most fleeting of sexual encounters with, or if he’s reviewing every one of his favorite hip-hop records, Heatley’s innocence and appreciation for life is always evident.  He is our generation’s Harvey Pekar, somewhat more socially well-adjusted, but a singularity just the same.  His stories are all realistic and never flinch from sharing the emotional content of everyday life, with all its painfully happy and awkward moments.

Portrait of My Dad

My Brain is Hanging Upside Down is divided into five sections, each very focused on its topic, and all with some overlapping threads of family, sex and music.  The first section, Sex History, depicts all of Heatley’s sexual experiences with blinding honesty.  His simple, almost childish art makes the graphic sexuality innocent and endearing.  Heatley’s panels are like manic sketches of the most intense moments of his life.

Each of the five sections begins with a number of dream stories relating to each topic.  The second and fifth sections, Black History and Family History respectively, stick to the format of Sex History, with literal laundry lists of experiences and personalities.  Only in sections three and four, Portrait of My Mom and Portrait of My Dad does Heatley allow himself to become expansive and relate separate stories to one another in a less linear manner.

In most of the other sections, Heatley comes off like a typical 80s kid.  He’s enamored of hip-hop culture, yet never fully comfortable with it.  His sexual freedoms and experimentation seem quaint and almost old-fashioned.  Was he ever worried about getting AIDs when he was screwing all these girls and guys at college?  He doesn’t tell us.  But in the two Portraits we see Heatley’s strange and contradictory parents in a way that helps us understand his paranoia and obsessions in a whole new way.  His mother is the reformed hippie who doesn’t know when to stop trying to relate to her kids on their level and just try to be their mother.  His father is a bitter hermit who builds train sets in his basement and smiles bitterly at a world that left him behind.

Heatley's New Yorker Cover

So, I’m a fan of all types of comics.  I dig Alan Moore and Frank Miller as much as Harvey Pekar and R. Crumb.  However, if indie comics aren’t your thing, Heatley is going to seem juvenile and artless.  His drawings are all flat, with very little detail.  They look like they were scrawled off on notebook paper by a stoned high school kid during study hall.  If you’re not into Chris Ware or Kim Deitch, if you prefer Will Eisner’s superhero stuff to his brilliant The Contract with God trilogy, you’re probably not going to be into Heatley.  He’s not interested in the fantasy and exploitation of most mainstream comics and though his memoir is certainly for Adults Only, it will not satisfy your little boy prurient interests.  Still, it’s fun and funny enough in its weird, jaded way.

The other half of The Bent Spine, Mark Rooster, has been writing surreal autobiographical comics as long as I can remember.  His style and sense of humor reminds me of Heatley.  If you like My Brain is Hanging Upside Down, be sure to check out Mark’s site, www.markrooster.com. 

 

Related Links:

1. High-Low Review of My Brain is Hanging Upside Down

2. The Daily Cross Hatch Review of  My Brain is Hanging Upside Down

3. GraphicNovelReporter Interview with David Heatley

4. David Heatley's Site

Horror Film Star Feature #2: Jeffrey Combs

Since the eighties, Jeffrey Combs has been all over TV, in a variety of roles, including different characters on different incarnations of the Star Trek franchise, but horror fans know him more for his work in various genre films of the last thirty years. His best known role, Dr. Herbert West, has stayed with him for three Re-Animator films, the first coming out in 1985, from Charles Band's Empire Pictures, directed by Stuart Gordon.

Herbert West, originally an H. P. Lovecraft creation, is a phenomenal role, played so strangely and perfectly by Combs, a scientist hellbent on resurrecting the dead, acting out quite bizarrely on a regular basis, uncaring how any of his co-workers or associates digest his various eccentricities. Combs does amazing things with these sort of bizarro roles, and played another offbeat character in another Stuart Gordon film, From Beyond, the year after Re-Animator. From Beyond, also based on a Lovecraft story, has Combs playing another scientist, this time attempting to breach another world through a machine called the Resonator. It's just as gruesome as Gordon and Combs' last collaboration, though without nearly as much dark humor.

That humor, and Combs' expert way of using it throughout gory scenes of shock and horror, is part of what keeps Re-Animator fresh in the minds of horror fans years later, and is considered by many to be one of the best examples of the genre.

After Empire folded, Charles Band started up direct-to-video outfit Full Moon, which got a fast start thanks to the popularity of Puppet Master (1989) and its sequels. Combs, who apparently had a good working relationship with Band at Empire, joined for Full Moon for a string of films, including The Pit and the Pendulum (1990), Trancers II (1991), Doctor Mordrid (1992), and the extremely dark (particularly for a Full Moon movie) Castle Freak (1995).

Combs doesn't always play a psycho, but his more demented roles are the fan favorites. He played Herbert West again in Bride of Re-Animator (1989) and Beyond Re-Animator (2003), both of those films directed by Re-Animator producer Brian Yuzna. Combs has played characters based on Lovecraft creations a total of eight times, often with either Stuart Gordon or Brian Yuzna, or both.

Perhaps the most distinct aspect of a Combs performance is his odd speaking style, which is entirely an affectation, and not the manner in which the man speaks when not in front of a camera.

Combs has had roles, large to small, in various genre films since the eighties, and has appeared in studio films such as I Still Know What You Did Last Summer (1998) , The Frighteners (1996), and House On Haunted Hill (1999), as well as a number of low budget features. Check out the complete list on wikipedia or imdb.com.