Babel Clash

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?

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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!

I can’t believe our time at Babel Clash is already at an end. We’ve had two weeks filled with many things:  laughter, tears, obscenity, fangs and snark. But most of all–love. I’ll always remember it fondly. I know you will too.

Huge thanks to Dane for being such an excellent host and to the readers for putting up with our antics. It’s always a pleasure.

Now for the pimpage portion of this post (warning: exposure to pimpage may cause stress diarrhea, bleeding from the eyes and rashes in sensitive areas).

My latest book, GREEN-EYED DEMON is the third book in my Sabina Kane series. Just in time for Mardi Gras, the book is set in New Orleans and features drag queens, voodoo priestesses, scheming Cajuns and accidental zombies. If you like your urban fantasy dark with complex world building and sharp-edged humor, give it a try.

-end pimpage-

Until next time, Babel Clashians, I bid you adieu.

In comments about Jaye’s post on Tuesday, I saw something we’re all used to seeing: a little vampire hatin’.

For all of you out there who hate the vampire, Imma let you finish.

But let me just say something first . . .

I get it that there are a lot of people who see Twilight as the sort of cultural monolith they have to scorn. It’s the scorn version of a rubber mallet hitting an elbow. After all, the Twilight phenomenon is huge. It sparkles. Teen girls love it so much they swoon, while their moms, embarrassingly enough, are right there with them.

Personally, I love that Twilight got young people reading. I love seeing message boards where–rather than just imbibing Twilight’s mixed bag of messages as if they were custard–young girls debate those messages. And I love it when I get an older teen reader who writes to me, “I loved Twilight when I was younger. But I wanted something more. Then I found Jane.”

In my secret fantasies, I consider Jane the Anti-Bella, but we won’t get into that.

What I will get into is that vampires aren’t the enemies. All of the centuries of amazing mythology coming from every single corner of the globe should not be dismissed. The fact that vampires  have terrified the human race for centuries, in multiple incarnations, should not be dismissed. They fact that the act of sucking life essence from our bodies is a fear so primordial and so charismatic we’ve had to touch upon it, as a species and throughout our existence, should not be dismissed.

The fact vampires offer up a raft of double penetration jokes should not be dismissed.

And yes, vampires have been silly over the centuries. Let’s not forgive the legendary goat-sucker, the chupacabra. But vampires have also always fascinated humanity. Indeed, why they’ve always fascinated humans gives us such insight into our own dark depths. They are, after all, the walking embodiment of that mystifying connection between thanatos and eros–between death and sex. Even the Twilight series, in its admittedly awkward and rather puerile way, tried to work out just how this connection functions for us, and why it rivets us as a species.

In other words, don’t blame the vampire for how it’s been portrayed. It couldn’t help Gary Oldman’s boob wig any more than it could help the sparkles.

All it wants to do is live happily, seducing mortals with its unholy offerings of pleasure and death. All it wants is our blood, our souls, and our bodies. And throughout history, humans as a species have been helpless not to want to give in.

What a way to close out 2010, right? Many thanks go out to our friends at Pyr for sending Clay, Susan, and Jasper our way to take Babel Clash 2010 out in style. Thanks so much to all three of you for great posts and topics. It truly was a joy reading everything. While I agree with you all in some parts regarding remakes, I will admit, I did go see True Grit twice and hail it as far superior to the original (and much more faithful to the novel).  I still haven’t been able to force myself to see TRON though - I think one movie with Jeff Bridges is enough for now…

Since this is your last day on the blog Clay, Susan, and Jasper, I thought it would be a good time to use today for a bit of self-promotion.  Feel free to plug anything you’re working on or want our readers to know about.  It’s the least I can offer for such a great stint on the blog! 

The Griffiths and Jasper Kent did a great job closing up the year for us, and I suspect our next two guests will be able to pick up where Jasper and the Griffiths usher us into another exciting year on Babel Clash.

When looking at who to book to start 2011 off, I thought we needed to discuss a debate for the ages.  Because of that I turned to Holly Black and Scott Westerfeld!  They’ll be spending this next week debating the age-old question Zombies vs. Unicorns?

Are you on Team Zombie or Team Unicorn?

Aside from taking the lead on Team Unicorn, Holly Black is also known as the bestselling author of The Spiderwick Chronicles, Modern Faerie Tales, and The Curse Workers.

Joining Holly on the blog to defend Team Zombie in this debate is Scott Westerfeld, known for his bestselling Midnighters, Uglies, Peeps, and Leviathan series. 

I’m not going to pick sides in this debate, but based on Orbit’s findings on cover trends, I think Team Unicorn may be in for an uphill battle.

Ah, wiggle room! (Though I’d have said ‘wriggle room’; I suspect it’s a transatlantic thing.) But wiggle or wriggle, it’s that thing you wish you had when writing book three and should have thought about when you were laying down the lore in book one. Absolute rules bind absolutely, and so, for example, The Danilov Quintet can never allow a vampire to so much as open the curtains in daytime without it being reduced to a pile of smouldering ashes on the carpet.

Clay and Susan’s solution in The Greyfriar is wonderfully elegant. By making heat the problem, absolutes are avoided, but there remains the traditional correlation with vampires and night-time. Plus we get a bonus beyond the alternating safety of night and day: a geographical alternation where the poles are the realm of the vampire and the tropics are a safe Tom Tiddler’s Ground where mankind might survive.

The voordalaki of my books are not especially susceptible to heat and cold. A voordalak can be destroyed by fire, but it cannot be frozen to death; instead its tissues will become hard as ice, allowing only its eyes to move. If it is lucky, a veil of snow will protect from sunlight, but if even a patch of that covering is wiped away, and the sun is allowed to fall on the solid but still susceptible flesh, then the sight of the ensuing reaction, as ice and flesh evaporate in an instant, is something to behold.

But it’s all very scientific, isn’t it? Vampires are creatures of the world, and obey its laws just as the rest of us must. It was not ever thus. In folklore and in early fiction a vampire’s nature was defined simply by its disconnection from God. The fear of daylight, holy water or religious symbols can easily make sense in these terms, and even more subtle characteristics such as the lack of a reflection or the inability to cast a shadow were often attributed to the fact that the vampire has no soul. Hawthorn is in many traditions the best wood for making a stake, not least because of its association with Christ’s Crown of Thorns. Vampires are unholy and despise that which is holy. What more do we need to understand?

Today, such an explanation will rarely suffice. That the shape of a cross – formed merely from a pair of candlesticks – should send a vampire cowering seems almost laughable. The finest example is at the end of Hammer’s Brides of Dracula when Van Helsing (played – Yay! – by Peter Cushing) defeats his villainous foe (not actually Dracula and not – boo hoo! – Christopher Lee) by turning the sails of a windmill so that their shadow forms a giant cross which falls on the creature’s body.

It does not work for the modern viewer, or reader, who understands cause and effect (nor did it, let’s be honest, in 1960). Regardless of their belief in God, people generally accept scientific explanations of most phenomena – and even though accepting vampires requires some suspension of disbelief, they still have to make sense in their own universe. It’s difficult to conceive how a cross could, by its very nature, have such a devastating effect. It could be reasoned that God intervenes at this point and exerts His divine power to destroy the undead abomination, but He could have done that anyway, even if no windmill had been to hand.

The general view of the world, since the time of Newton, is that it obeys physical laws. God may (or may not) have created the world and He (or Satan) may have created vampires, but after that, everything must obey universal laws. After that He must stay outside the machine. The biggest winners are neither vampires nor slayers. The winners are the readers. The losers are the authors, who have to make it all work.

Everything has to be explicable – that doesn’t mean it has to be explained, but it can’t leave the reader screaming, ‘That just doesn’t add up!’ Holy water is no different from any other water, except that it’s been blessed. That doesn’t alter it chemically. (The same goes for homeopathic medicine.) The only possible way that it can affect a vampire is if the vampire believes it will. (Ditto.) On the other hand, the sun can destroy a vampire’s body. I’m not sure exactly how it happens (I suspect it’s something to do with the effect of light on silver salts) but I and, I hope, the reader can see a way to it making sense. Heat, as Clay and Susan describe, affects vampires somewhat like a fever.

And so we return to that strangest vampire feature of all – the lack of reflection in a mirror. If we dismiss superstitious ideas about souls, how can that possibly be explained? Invisibility of any kind is tricky to achieve. Not only must the image of the vampire be removed, but it must be replaced with whatever lies behind it. God could achieve that, or a demon (specifically Maxwell’s Demon), but that would be cheating.

What it needs is serious scientific investigation. But who would dare carry out such experiments on a vampire?

With the first post in our blogging tennis match, Jasper Kent wrote about his vampires and their relationship to sunlight, and their natural love of this dark time of year. So we thought we would blog in a similar vein about the vampires in our book The Greyfriar: Vampire Empire Book 1.

In Jasper’s Twelve, the voordalaki (man, that’s a cool name!) can be destroyed by the rays of the sun. Naturally, creatures such as that prefer northern climes where there are longer nights for a greater portion of the year. In our book, sunlight is not devastating to vampires. They function in the day, as well as the night.

However, in the neo-Victorian world of The Greyfriar, the primary feature in a vampire’s relationship to the natural world is heat, not light. Heat is pathological to the creatures, so they are still impacted by the sun, but only in an indirect way. And heat doesn’t destroy them instantly; they don’t burst into flame the second the temperature rises above 80 degrees. But the hotter it gets, the slower they get. Think of it this way: a fever of 101 won’t kill you outright (although it might if you have it for an extended period of time), but in general, you just won’t function as well. Can you go to work? Probably. Could you find food and water to survive? Within reason. Are you at your best? No. Would you like to take an important exam? No. Can you pitch a no-hitter? Doubtful. Would you want to perform delicate surgery? Your patient wouldn’t want you to. The bottom line is, you aren’t at your best. Your stamina and strength and focus are lessened; your ability to feed and defend yourself is minimized.

That’s why our vampires don’t like the heat. Certainly they can survive in high temps for awhile, but they get progressively weaker and more sluggish. They’d rather lie down during the heat of the day and come out at night when it’s cooler. They’d rather live in the northern or southern hemispheres where it’s cooler for a longer portion of the year. Heck, they’d rather live in the Arctic, but there isn’t much food up there. And they certainly don’t care for the tropics where higher temperatures are sustained year round, both day and night. If they are forced to stay in constant high heat, they could eventually die because they wouldn’t be able to feed themselves. Or they could be killed because they can’t defend themselves from humans who are hunting them.

As in Jasper’s books, our vampires’ place in the natural world defines the basic structure for our story. There are rules, although ours have more wiggle room than some vampire mythology, but still, there are rules.

The vampires’ reaction to heat is only one of the elements of vampire mythology that we played with for Vampire Empire. Our vampires are different in many other ways, and that is what’s great about vampires. They’re very flexible as characters or story elements. As sometime comic book writers, we would liken them to superheroes as a genre. You can do anything with them. As a writer, you can approach vampires from a wide variety of angles and still have them be recognizable to the reader as vampires. Dark. Light. Humorous. Romantic. Monsters. Sexy. That’s why vampires never completely go away from fiction. No matter how much some critics moan about vampire overload, there will always be a new project that goes back to the roots of the creatures’ mythology and makes it new again (like Jasper’s beautiful Danilov Quintet) or takes those roots and gives them a new twist, like Vampire Empire.

Rachel and I have discussed so many things during our friendship, but one of the things we have in common is our deeply-rooted love of vampire lore. So she offered me this tasty challenge for today’s Babel Clash:

Name your favorite piece of traditional lore, and explain why!

There are so many bits of lore that I adore (oh look, poetry!), but my absolute favorite has to be that VAMPIRES CANNOT CROSS RUNNING WATER.

*raises eyebrow* Seriously? That’s all it takes to thwart a creature of the night when its tummy has the rumblies? Cross a river? Step over a stream? Head into a city, where the sewer pipes run maze-like beneath its streets? How much water, exactly? Would a busted pipe leaking all over the kitchen floor do the job? Or are we talking Mississppi River flowage here?

And another question….why? The lore do0esn’t say the water must be blessed by a priest or anything. Simply running. So what about that scares the living nightlights out of a vampire? And, to add to that, do vampires shower?

I love this bit of lore because it reminds me how silly we can be as people, and how easily some of us will believe what we are told. It reminds me to form my own opinions.

And to live on an island somewhere.

Could vampires actually be real? I say yes, for a few reasons.

For one, we don’t actually know how big snakes get. A fossil of a reticulated python was found in a coal mine in 2008 in the Amazon rainforest, and Paleontologists estimated the length of the snake to be 43 feet long and estimated it to weigh 2,500 pounds. Big snake, right? You’d think  it would be the biggest ever. But the thing is…we just don’t know how big they get. Claims that longer snakes have been aerially photographed have come and gone, but with nothing to compare as far as size, we can’t estimate how long the photographed snakes actually are. Scientists have said that we aren’t exactly sure how big they get, exactly. And if we can’t know something like that about our own planet, then who are we to say that vampires, for sure, don’t exist?

For two, I’m a person who believes in the things that go bump in the night. I believe in ghosts, and that Something Awful is lurking in my closet and under my bed. So…vampires…sure. Why not? If I claim to have an open mind, I don’t think I can exclude this too, just because so many fictions have been based on them. (I say this, hoping that I never encounter a Chupacabra)

So….maybe.

That’s my answer, and I’m sticking to it. Like fangs in a neck.

Heather Brewer asked a totally fabulous question today, which is:

Could vampires actually exist?

In theory, I’d have to say yes. There are plenty of examples in nature to support it … mosquitos for a start, bedbugs, leeches, ticks, and of course vampire bats, but even some types of butterflies have recently been seen to sip blood (and moths as well).

Over time, every predator ends up with something preying on it … usually, in the case of very large and skillful predators, small things like ticks and leeches, or even viruses and bacteria. Humans have a number of natural predators, but we can generally outwit and outplay them … but maybe a vampire is the perfect countermeasure, because they’re human plus (or minus, depending on how you feel about such things).

I don’t see any reason why vampires couldn’t logically exist in nature. Now, would they be combustible in daylight? Survey says no, because that takes a mystical element that isn’t generally found in nature. But they certainly could be daylight-shy, like many nocturnal hunters.

So I’m going to go with a conditional YES on this one. Vampires can exist, but some of their more supernatural aspects might not quite hold up to the light of day (as it were).

What about you: yes? No? Maybe? Know one personally? ARE ONE?

Discuss!