Babel Clash

It’s been great having Seanan and Devon on these past two weeks.  All of their posts were filled with lots of great content and ideas (and lots of good tips for aspiring writers).  While it’s sad to see them go, as is customary here, their last day shall be used to plug any past, current, or future projects!  Let the self-promotion commence!

Then, when the dust clears, we’ll be joined by two authors who combine some of my favorite things - steampunk, superheroes, and New York City!

First, let’s welcome George Mann back to the blog!  His latest series for Pyr follows The Ghost and should not be missed.

Joining George is Andrew P. Mayer, who debuts the Society of Steam series with Pyr this year! This series follows the adventures of Sarah Stanton on her path to becoming a hero in a time where women weren’t even allowed to vote.

Again, please join me in thanking Seanan and Devon for their time on the blog and welcoming George and Andrew!

Devon’s argument seems to be basically “Soylent Green is made of stories!  It’s stooooooories!”  Oddly enough, I don’t really find that I have much of a problem with that.  Anything that uses cannibalism to make a point is a-okay by me.  She also brought up genre cues, the little things people use to tell whether something is horror or fantasy or romance before they even open the cover.

Let’s talk tropes.

Three protagonists walk into a bar.  One is a cranky-looking dishwater blonde in a leather jacket, with pointy ears and sensible shoes.  She travels with her own personal Cloud o’ Doom ™, like Grumpy Bear with breasts and knives.  One is a brunette in black, CJ Cregg by way of Spider Jerusalem, wearing sunglasses in the middle of the day and opening carrying her firearms.  The last has short blonde hair, three-inch high heels, and a regulation tango dress made almost entirely of fringe.  Oh, and talking mice.  Now what are their genres?

The first is easy: urban fantasy (she’s not showing enough skin for paranormal romance).  The second could go in a lot of directions, most of them involving the words “thriller”; it’s the sunglasses.  Knowing that I’m a science fiction writer in my spare time, you can say “science fiction thriller” with relative confidence.  The third would probably be filed in a Meg Cabot-type contemporary romance, except for the talking mice, so putting her on the lighter side of urban fantasy, with the potential to wander into paranormal romance to borrow a cup of sugar, is a relatively safe bet.

We use little cues to tell us what a story will contain.  Buckets of blood on the cover?  Probably going to be horror, or at the very least, some pretty darn gruesome science fiction.  Most fantasy won’t actually have blood on the cover, even if the book itself is drenched in the stuff.  Chick in black leather on the cover?  Probably urban fantasy.  Oh, wait, she’s wearing heels and has visible tattoos?  Probably paranormal romance.  It can be hard to tell sometimes.  Those two genres are kissing cousins, and they have a tendency to sneak off and make out in closets when they think nobody’s looking.

The trouble with tropes is this: there’s a reason the word “trope” shares three letters with the word “trap.”  If you use too many of the trappings of a genre, you’re going to get included with that genre, whether you intended to be or not, and once you’re there, you’re going to be measured against all the tropes you didn’t use, as well as all the tropes you did.  Your urban fantasy heroine wears combat boots and kicks teeth in?  Awesome, but why isn’t she having sex?  Your mad scientists cackle and release world-destroying plagues?  Neat, but why aren’t they raising the dead?  And so on.  Genres are like tar pits.  They’ll suck you in.

Sometimes, the hardest thing about writing in more than one genre at the same time is remembering which tools I can’t bring with me from one story to the next, and which complications I can’t avoid.  Rose Marshall, being dead, is capable of getting out of most of the issues which plague Verity Price simply by going insubstantial and letting people shoot at her ghostly form until they either run out of bullets or get bored and wander away.  Verity, on the other hand, is not at risk of being shoved into a jam jar and left on a pantry shelf for seventy years.  So there’s a series of trade-offs to be made.  Can’t cover your urban fantasy backstory with science, can’t cover your science fiction backstory with “the pixies did it, bite me.”

Some things are universal across the genres.  The gun on the mantle in act one goes off in act three; the protagonist who wears a white shirt and goes out for Italian food is about to need some bleach; pixies don’t like flyswatters.  But other things are trapped by tropes, and they don’t get to cross over.  No matter how much you may occasionally want them to.

As promised, we have three winners to announce for the David Moody giveaway!

Each of these three people will each win an autographed copy of the following David Moody books!

Remember, winners were chosen at random.

Winner #1 is Amy who wrote  that “Looking into a mirror in the dark, and open closet doors in a dark, dark room” is what scares her the most.

Winner #2 is Dave who wrote this in regards to what scares him most.

What scares me most? Last weekend I was out hiking/tramping (depending on your version of English) the forest fell silent on me. Yeah I know what you’re thinking, ‘Dave’s afraid of silence’, but holy crap that sh*t was eerie… natures cacophony of birds and insects ceased in an instant and I got that tingling sensation right up my spine like there was a hidden pair of eyes sending nastiness right at me. Freaky. What did I do? Like any 34 year old 6′2″ 180 pound man, I ran as hard as I could till the birds started singing again.

And, last but not least, Winner #3 is Kira Madden who wrote:

What scares me the most? I wish I had one answer to that, because there’s so many things in the world. Bring eaten alive, by anything, sounds pretty terrible to me. Or anything having to do with pain. But I think that being the only person alive in the world would scare me alot. No one to talk to, just you and whatever area you happen to be in. Don’t get me wrong, I like quite, but there’s only so much silence until it’s creepy.

Congrats to all three winners and for those of you who didn’t win, keep reading because we love giveaways here on Babel Clash.  Also, if you didn’t win, I encourage you to pick up David Moody’s books regardless because they’re great reads! 

I’ll be in touch with the winners shortly.  Thanks again to Mr. Moody for sponsoring this contest!

Today is July 4th, but in the Babel Clash world, it’s the Monday before the changing of the guard.  For the last two weeks two of horror’s best authors, Jonathan Maberry and David Moody, have been gracing us with posts about zombies, the craft of writing, and giveaways.  Not bad for two weeks!  I wanted to thank them both for spending the last two weeks with us!  Please use today to promote to your heart’s content - past, current, and future projects (Oxford comma!)  Also, for those of you who have entered David’s giveaway, tune in tomorrow to see who won the autographed books!

You should also tune in tomorrow because we have another set of amazing authors slated to begin posting for us.  Starting tomorrow, we’ll be joined by Seanan McGuire and Devon Monk!

Seanan McGuire is the author of the October Daye series.  In the series, we learn that fairy tales are real, and the main character, Toby Daye, is a changeling - half fae, half human.  The latest Toby Daye novel is Late Eclipses, followed by One Salt Sea in September (notice the Shakespearean references?).  Besides writing the Toby Daye series, Seanan McGuire also spends some of her time writing under the name Mira Grant.  The books by Mira Grant form the Newsflesh Trilogy (the second in the series, Deadline, was just released) and they involve a very interesting take on zombies.

Devon Monk also writes an urban fantasy series.  Her series stars Allie Beckstrom.  Beckstrom is a Hound - someone who can track a spell back to its caster.  In Beckstrom’s world, the use of magic incurs a physical (or mental) cost.  It’s interesting to read how Monk touches on the implications of the use of magic in her Beckstrom novels. The latest Allie Beckstrom novel is Magic on the Hunt, with Magic on the Line due out in November.

Devon steps aside from Allie Beckstrom briefly for a new series. The first book in her new steampunk comes out tomorrow, July 5th. That book, Dead Iron, takes place in the American Wild West in a time where bounty hunters, gunslingers, magic, and steam all intermingle. If paranormal and steampunk are your thing, Monk’s new series starring Cedar Hunt is right up your alley.

Readers, please join me in thanking Jonathan and David while also welcoming Seanan and Devon to the blog. It’s going to be another great two weeks!

It’s almost time to call it a wrap with Jonathan and David unfortunately, but while they still have the floor, we’re going to give away some stuff. Sound like a plan? I thought so! Here’s the deal, David Moody has three sets of books to give away - and he’ll even sign them before mailing them out. The prizes are as follows - three sets of the following two books - Autumn and Hater.  Those are the first books in both of David’s series, so it’s a great opportunity to jump into both of his series (which are well worth the read if you ask me).  Even better news?  David is willing to ship these three prize packs internationally, which means this give away is going GLOBAL!

Before I spill the beans about how to be eligible to win one of, I just want everyone to know that even if you don’t win, I strongly encourage everyone to pick up the Autumn and Hater series because they’re great examples of what horror should be.  I read a lot of books in the genre, and I hold Moody’s books in high regard!

Ok, so you want to get a chance to win a signed copy of both Autumn and Hater?  Here’s the deal.  In the comment section to this blog post, respond with an answer to this question - What scares you the most?

Three winners will be chosen at random from everyone who posts a comment!  The winners will be announced Tuesday, July 5th, so make sure you comment by EOD Monday, July 4th EST to enter.

Good Luck!

Hello all!

I love horror. No apologies, no excuses. I’ve loved the genre since I was only enough to have fun being scared (and I think I was still in Underoos at the time). I love when horror is get-the-defibrillator scary and I love horror when it’s bust-your-gut funny. I love it in print, I love it on the silver screen. I love it on TV, in comics, and just about any other way I can get it.

There are some works of horror that I return to over and over again. Like buying another ticket for that same rickety, scary, wonderful roller-coaster every summer. I wanted to share some of those with you. Landmark works of horror that left their claw-marks on me. Here are a few of my must-have horror books (with some comments on the movie adaptations). Read the list, and tell me what you think. If I missed one of your favorites, tell me about it so I can go check it out.

THE HAUNTING OF HILL HOUSE by Shirley Jackson: This was the first truly frightening novel I read, and the original BW movie is still my pick for the scariest horror film ever made. It’s all about the suspense, not about what jumps out at you. The remake is to be avoided at all costs.

THE LEGEND OF HELL HOUSE by Richard Matheson: This was an attempt to modernize the Shirley Jackson model, and Matheson nails it. The novel is scary as hell, tapping into the early 1970s vibe still humming from ROSEMARY’S BABY, THE EXORCIST and THE AMITYVILLE HORROR. The movie is a wonderful adaptation of the novel and holds up pretty well all these years later.

THE MANITOU by Graham Masterton. Though a little dated (and very often copied) nowadays, this was a deeply disturbing novel with an unexpected theme. It has one of the most frightening descriptions of evil that I’ve ever read, and that has not diminished one bit. The movie is fun; the book is far superior. I also recommend DEVILS OF D-DAY and THE WELLS OF HELL.

GHOST STORY by Peter Straub. A true American gothic novel. This should be taught in creative writing and American literature programs. Lush, rococo, and finely crafted; with a killer opening line, a terrific set of villains, and overall superb character development. And though the movie changed several essential plot points, it is a nail-biter of a classic. Scary and sexy.

‘SALEM’S LOT by Stephen King. For me this is a perfect horror novel; superior in my view to THE SHINING. It has some of the most terrifying images—seen and alluded to, and King’s most powerful and effective descriptive language. The first TV miniseries adaptation was terrifying and, though dated, is definitely worth watching. This is one novel I return to every few years.

THE MIST by Stephen King. Though technically a blend of science fiction and Cthulhu-style fantasy, it is one of King’s masterpieces. My only complaints are that it was too short for my tastes, and he never wrote a sequel. Damn it. The movie was really good and had an even more powerful ending –one of which I thoroughly approve.

I AM LEGEND by Richard Matheson: The first true blending of horror with science fiction, and a marvelous piece of social commentary. The essence of the novel’s plot —especially the biting ending—has yet to be translated into film. The Vincent Price version, THE LAST MAN ON EARTH, took a stab at it, but the movie is stultifyingly boring. The Charlton Heston version, THE OMEGA MAN, is cheesy popcorn fun without depth; and though the first half of the Will Smith version had real promise, it veered away from Matheson’s key themes at the end. Oh, and Matheson gave me a signed copy of the book when I was fourteen.

THE RATS, LAIR and DOMAIN by James Herbert. I love this series so much Simple concept: very large, very cranky swarms of genetically modified rats. What’s not to like? Absolutely great storytelling with lean prose and a lightning pace. And…ewwww!

RATMAN’S NOTEBOOKS by Stephen Gilbert. This was the basis for the movie WILLARD (the original was pretty good) and BEN (don’t bother). It’s a psychological thriller about a disintegrating mind that is every bit as chilling as PSYCHO.

PSYCHO by Robert Bloch. Speaking of PSYCHO, the Robert Bloch novel is a lost classic. It informed a generation of slasher and serial killer novels by creating tropes which made other, lesser writers more famous. Bloch wrote it first and best…and he never strayed into cheap shots. The suspense is scream-inducing and the payoff is brilliant. Without this book we would never have had SILENCE OF THE LAMBS.

THE HOUND OF THE BASKERVILLES by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. I had to slip this in because it is also an often-copied model in that it is a straight mystery told in the form of a horror novel. Often filmed to varying degrees of success, but always moody and interesting. My personal favorite is the Peter Cushing/Christopher Lee version, but there are many good ones. Read the book first.

SOMETHING WICKED THIS WAY COMES by Ray Bradbury. Before there was even a Young Adult genre in fiction, Bradbury crafted a perfect horror-fantasy in which an evil circus (Cooger and Dark’s Pandemonium Shadow Show) comes to town. The same year Matheson gave me a copy of I AM LEGEND, Bradbury gave me a copy of this. I read a copy of this book every year on Halloween.

PHANTOMS by Dean R. Koontz. This is a science fiction novel written as a horror novel. Koontz was never better and few other writers are anywhere near as scary. This is a truly disturbing nail-biter of a read. The movie was okay, but this really needs a miniseries to explore its nuances.

MYSTERY WALK by Robert McCammon. This early novel of McCammon’s has gorgeous and unexpected imagery, including a description of the sound a haunted buzz-saw makes that will definitely stay with you. I came back to this after twenty years and it was every bit as good.

Those are a few of my must-haves.

So…what scares you?

********************
Jonathan Maberry is a NY Times bestselling author, multiple Bram Stoker Award winner, and Marvel Comics writer. His novels include the Pine Deep Trilogy –Ghost Road Blues, Dead Man’s Song and Bad Moon Rising; the Joe Ledger thriller series –Patient Zero, The Dragon Factory, The King of Plagues, and Assassin’s Code; the Benny Imura Young Adult dystopian series -Rot & Ruin, Dust & Decay, and Flesh & Bone; the film adaptation of The Wolfman and the standalone horror thriller –Dead of Night. His nonfiction books include the international bestseller Zombie CSU, The Cryptopedia, They Bite, Vampire Universe and Wanted Undead of Alive. He has sold over 1200 feature articles, thousands of columns, two plays, greeting cards, technical manuals, how-to books, and many short stories. His comics for Marvel include Marvel Universe vs the Wolverine, Marvel Universe vs the Punisher, DoomWar, Black Panther and Captain America: Hail Hydra. He is the founder of the Writers Coffeehouse and co-founder of The Liars Club; and is a frequent keynote speaker and guest of honor at conferences including BackSpace, Dragon*Con, ZombCon, PennWriters, The Write Stuff, Central Coast Writers, Necon, Killer Con, Liberty States, and many others. In 2004 Jonathan was inducted into the International Martial Arts Hall of Fame, due in part to his extensive writing on martial arts and self-defense. Visit him online at www.jonathanmaberry.com, www.twitter.com/jonathanmaberry and www.facebook.com/jonathanmaberry

The title is fitting because on one hand, it’s time to say good bye to our current guests (which is always horrific because we enjoy when folks stop by to chat) - Daniel H. Wilson and Ernest Cline.  I had a blast chatting robots and the like these past two weeks.  I never officially announced my favorite robots because they tend to be on the evil side of things - The Sentinels from X-Men lore and the Giant Robot that housed Krang on Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles - but rest assured I was right there along for the ride.

If you haven’t yet, make sure you pick up a copy of Robopocalypse and pre-order a copy of Ready Player One - you won’t regret it!

Then, once you are done purchasing and pre-ordering, make sure to click right back over to Babel Clash because the flipside of saying “Oh the horror…” is coming up right around the corner.  That’s right, our next guests are two of my favorite authors in the horror genre today!  Starting tomorrow, Jonathan Maberry and David Moody will be here to scare you silly (or to just genuinely entertain you).

Jonathan Maberry is a multiple Bram Stoker-award winning author who has given us such works as the Pine Deep Trilogy, the Joe Ledger novels, several great Marvel storylines (my favorite being Marvel Universe vs. The Punisher), and an upcoming zombie novel called Dead of Night.

Joining Jonathan is David Moody, who you may know from his Autumn series (which he originally gave away for free - the new volume, Purification, comes out later this summer! ) or his Hater series (book 3 comes out this Fall - they’ve come a long way since the days of Infected Books!).

Please join me in not only thanking Daniel H. Wilson and Ernest Cline for their stay on Babel Clash, but in also welcoming Jonathan Maberry and David Moody.  This is going to be another great two weeks on Babel Clash!

Glen Duncan’s The Last Werewolf is one of my favorite books of the summer. It has a very literary feel, but the gritty horror experience that makes you want to keep turning the pages. I was honestly blown away by Duncan’s portrayal of Jake, and the inner and outer conflict he experiences throughout the book.  

I could gush about the book all day, but I’m going to let the publisher’s description of the book speak for itself because I want to get to the blog Glen wrote just for Borders (because it’s a great blog!).

 Meet Jake. A bit on the elderly side (he turns 201 in March), but you’d never suspect it. Nonstop sex and exercise will do that for you—and a diet with lots of animal protein. Jake is a werewolf, and after the unfortunate and violent death of his one contemporary, he is now the last of his species.

Although he is physically healthy, Jake is deeply distraught and lonely.

Jake’s depression has carried him to the point where he is actually contemplating suicide—even if it means terminating a legend thousands of years old. It would seem to be easy enough for him to end everything. But for very different reasons there are two dangerous groups pursuing him who will stop at nothing to keep him alive. Here is a powerful, definitive new version of the werewolf legend—mesmerising and incredibly sexy. In Jake, Glen Duncan has given us a werewolf for the twenty-first century—a man whose deeds can only be described as monstrous but who is in some magical way deeply human.

One of the most original, audacious, and terrifying novels in years.

So, without further ado, here’s Glen Duncan’s blog.  Also, after you read it, make sure you click below for information on an advanced copy giveaway sponsored by our friends at Knopf!  You could win one of 18 advanced copies that Knopf has made available to our readers (the giveaway is for US residents only though).

Origins of a Monster

Glen Duncan

I started The Last Werewolf in a fittingly sociopathic mood. Having published seven overtly literary novels that had been (by and large) well received but read by virtually no one, the thought of writing another made me feel homicidal and ill. I didn’t feel any less homicidal or ill when my agent informed me that if I did write another overtly literary novel, he wouldn’t be able to sell it. Publishing wasn’t immune from recession. Overnight, literary novelists who weren’t household names found themselves topping the list of the hilariously expendable. I was on borrowed time.

So, with burning armpits and a face like a furious three-year-old’s, I decided to write a straight, commercial, genre novel. No philosophy, no existential angst, no abstract ideas, no metafictional conceits. Just a ripping yarn. Just a page turner. How difficult could that be, with a werewolf for a protagonist?

Surprisingly difficult, I’m happy to say. Courtesy of idiocy or inspiration I began not with the genre question - What are werewolves like? - but with the innocent question - What would it be like to be a werewolf? The questions sound similar, but they’re quite different, and admit quite different answers. The first asks you to consult an existing list. The second asks you to write your own. The first guarantees the fiction of the familiar. The second invites the fiction of the strange. The weight of genre cliché convinces us we know what it’s like to be a spy, or a detective, or a hit-man, or a femme fatale, or a werewolf—until the innocent question, answered innocently, reveals what we thought we knew to be little more than a fraud, entertaining or reassuring or benign—but a fraud nonetheless. There’s always more to it (whatever ‘it’ happens to be) than the weight of cliché would have us believe. Or to use the Sontag line Jake’s so fond of: ‘Whatever is happening, something else is always going on.’

That said, make no mistake: Jake is a werewolf, blood-dazed and sex-crazed—and I hope for my sake his monstrous adventures compel readers to keep turning the pages. But what became apparent the moment I began writing him was that werewolf or not, his dilemmas and desires were human, all too human. Love, lust, death, morality, cruelty, compassion, the hunger for meaning in a universe that demonstrates its absurdity on a daily basis… it was thematic business as usual for me, once I’d agreed to take my hairy boy’s psychology seriously. I started to enjoy myself. Mercenary cynicism morphed into aesthetic fascination. The hooker found herself prodigiously turned-on by her trick. What began as a clinical engagement exploded into a love affair. A dozen pages in to what was supposed to be pragmatic self-exile I realized I’d never been more at home.

The result? To some it’ll be a literary novel about a werewolf. To others a werewolf novel with literary ambitions. But to me it’s just another story that explores, like its seven predecessors, the endlessly fruitful gap between what we are and what we want to be.

(continue reading…)

Sorry to be back to the Simpsons already, but looking at all those pictures of Peter Cushing being choked, I could help but wonder if Homer might, like me – and it seems Clay – might have been raised on the Hammer films and might have let what he had absorbed subconsciously influence his decisions on how to discipline his son. And they say that onscreen violence doesn’t affect behaviour.

Homer choking Bart

But the connection also reminded me of how close comedy and horror can be, and how carefully one has to tread the line between them. I think it probably applies more to movies than to books. A couple of my favourite horror movies, Theatre of Blood and Misery, are black comedies – the former perhaps more obviously so. But I’d stretch the point. Even The Omen and the greatest horror movie ever made, The Wicker Man, can be taken as comedies. In Theatre of Blood the comic premise is to look at all the horrible stuff that goes on in Shakespeare and think, ‘Wouldn’t it be funny if all that happened for real.’ And the ‘funny’ can be ‘funny ha ha’ or ‘funny peculiar’ or ‘funny downright scary’. The Omen is just the same, except that it examines all that horrible stuff that goes on in the Book of Revelation. (“It’s all in the Bible, son. It’s the prankster’s bible.” – H. Simpson.)

Seeing The Wicker Man as a comedy is a harder one to swing, but I’ll give it a go. Quick plot summary: a pompous, prudish official get his comeuppance from a group of people who do not share his moral code. I could be talking about Edward Woodward’s Sergeant Howie keeping his appointment with the Wicker Man, but I could equally be speaking of Malvolio in Twelfth Night.

What I’m not talking about here is comedy horror. This is not Abbot and Costello Meet Frankenstein, nor even the sublime League of Gentlemen (though try watching some of it with the studio audience laughter). In horror and in black comedy, the actors have to play the whole thing with a straight face – and it’s just as tricky in both genres. But horror is still a different category from black comedy. The acid test is whether it can be spoofed. Misery (which is a black comedy) and Silence of the Lambs (which if it is, is way too subtle for me) came out about a year apart, and were both spoofed by the double act French and Saunders. But while I thought their Silence of the Lambs was excellent, their Misery seemed only to be repeating the jokes that were already in the original film, just overplaying them.

But let’s end on a joke, which might easily have come from a cracker pulled at yesterday’s Christmas dinner.

A man walks into a bar and says ‘ouch!’ It was an iron bar.

A classic joke – which means you’ve already heard it, but it also has a classic form: a normal situation which we interpret in a predictable way is suddenly changed to something more out of the ordinary, but which is still entirely consistent with what we’ve been told – and with painful consequences. Not a bad definition of comedy.

And not a bad definition of horror either.

As a thank you - please email me your lists of greatest gothics ever and I’ll pick one winner to win a gift card from Borders along with a copy of my last book - The Hypnotist! Happy reading everyone! MJRoseAuthor at gmail dot com.