Tag Archives: Sharyn McCrumb

Pixel Scroll 3/28/23 Pixels Yearning To Be Running With The Wild Things

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(1) LINK Q&A. “Kelly Link Can’t Write Narrative Before 3pm: And Other Tips For Purposeful Writing” at Literary Hub.

What time of day do you write?
I’ve spent a lot of time trying to figure out why I hate writing so much, when it’s also the thing that I want most to do—it turns out a large piece of this is that I mostly hate writing when I’m attempting to do it between waking up to around 2 pm. For a long time, I thought that real writers settled down to do their work first thing, and so I must be a dilettante not to be able to get anything done without finding it excruciating.

Finally, after lots of experimenting, I’ve realized that before 2 pm I can’t really make much headway, and that at some point between 2 and 3 in the afternoon some little switch in my brain flips, and I can think about narrative. And so now, on days when I’m going to write (including important emails), in the morning I do dishes, play games on my phone, and even watch some TV. From 3 pm to around 1 am, given the freedom to just write, I can get a lot of work done….

(2) OBVIOUSLY WRITTEN AFTER 3 P.M. And The New Yorker has a review of Link’s new collection White Cat, Black Dog: “A Shape-Shifting Short-Story Collection Defies Categorization”.

…One thing that fairy tales teach us, of course, is that it’s wise not to examine such magic too closely—better to accept the gift gratefully than to inquire into its provenance. Still, at the risk of incurring the magician’s wrath, we might look more closely at one of these stories and see if we can figure out how it works. “Prince Hat Underground” is the second story in the new collection, and the only one that’s previously unpublished. It begins in a very un-fairy-tale-like fashion, in medias res: “And who, exactly, is Prince Hat?” This isn’t as familiar an opening as “Once upon a time,” but it does point down a well-trodden path in literary fiction—that is, toward a character portrait. “Gary, who has lived with Prince Hat for over three decades, still sometimes wonders,” Link continues. And so the plot becomes even more familiar: this is the story of a marriage, and, more particularly, a story of the secrets that persist even in long-term relationships. Already we have, in two lines, a thumbnail sketch of this relationship, between staid, reliable Gary and the boyish, fanciful Prince Hat….

(3) SMALL WONDERS KICKSTARTER NEARS FINISH LINE. Stephen Granade reports, “We’re in the final day-and-a-half of the Small Wonders Kickstarter and are tantalizingly close to funding. We’ve passed 75% funded so got to release a new story from Nebula winner John Wiswell.”

Read “Irresponsibly Human” at the link.

I already got a body. Infiltrating their planet was easy after that; theirs is a simple culture, so unevolved that social media is still legal. Give me a week of using this body and the culture’s tech, and I’ll have enough experiential data to synthesize a whole army. They won’t even know we’re here until we’ve won. I’m going to be the first person to conquer another planet as a senior thesis project….

Granade adds, “When we reach 90% we’ll release a new poem by Beth Cato, and we’ve got a new story from Premee Mohamed as a reward for us fully funding.” 

(4) YOUR NAME THERE. NASA continues to invite people to “Send Your Name to Mars” on a “Future Mars Mission” whenever that may be. In the meantime, you can download a lovely Boarding Pass. My name went to Mars with Perseverance.

(5) DIAL TIME. Do you have Indiana Jones in Cannes? Well, let him out! “Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny to Debut at Cannes” and The Hollywood Reporter has details.

…The French fest runs May 16-27, with Dial of Destiny eying a day two or day three debut.

It is a homecoming of sorts for the pulpy hero. Fifteen years ago, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull debuted at the fest, which has been a launching ground for tentpoles in recent years…. 

(6) NO RESPECT. Ed Power demands to know, “This Mormon sci-fi author made $55m last year. So why isn’t he taken seriously?” The article, about WIRED’s hit job on Sanderson, is behind a paywall at The Telegraph.

From tipping the barman to pre-teen beauty pageants, America is no stranger to bizarre rituals. One of the weirdest is the glossy magazine “hit piece”. This involves a journalist pretending to be friends with a famous person and then demolishing them over 2,000 words or so. Make that 4,000 in the case of a new Wired magazine “profile” of fantasy author Brandon Sanderson, in which the best-selling writer is subjected to a thorough biffing-up….

(7) PUBLISHING NIGHTMARE AVOIDS PRISON. “Book fraudster Filippo Bernardini spared jail” – the Guardian says he will be deported instead.

…Filippo Bernardini, who worked as a rights coordinator, pleaded guilty to one count of wire fraud in New York in January.

He was yesterday sentenced by judge Colleen McMahon to time served, meaning he will not be imprisoned, according to the Bookseller. He has agreed to pay $88,000 (£72,700) to Penguin Random House to cover the legal and expert fees the company paid as a result of his scheme.

Bernardini has also been sentenced to three years of supervised release, and will be deported from the US to the UK or Italy, where he grew up….

(8) MEMORY LANE.

1992 – [Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]

Great secondary characters are a must in any ongoing series. So it is with Sharyn McCrumb’s Ballad series, mysteries set in her native Appalachian region. And here we get the story of Nora Bonesteel. 

The one that is our Beginning this Scroll is from The Hangman’s Beautiful Daughter which was published by Scribner in 1992. It was the second in the series after the debut novel, If Ever I Return, Pretty Peggy-O. To date, there are thirteen Ballad novels and some shorter works. 

The Appalachian Writers Association gave The Hangman’s Beautiful Daughter its Award for Best Novel. 

As per our policy here of absolutely no spoilers, I won’t say anything this novel or anything explicit about the series. I’ll only say that the author has a deft hand at writing interesting characters set in what seems to be authentic Appalachian settings with interesting stories. 

PROLOGUE 

Summer for the living, 
Winter for the dead—

The rule for solstice alignment 
of standing stones 
in pre-christian britain 

Nora Bonesteel was the first one to know about the Underhill family. Death was no stranger to Dark Hollow, Tennessee, but Nora Bonesteel was the only one who could see it coming. 

She was well past seventy, and she lived alone in a white frame house up on the part of Ashe Mountain that had been Bonesteel land since 1793. Across the patchwork of field and forest, eye to eye with the Bonesteel house, was the outcrop of rock called Hangman, looking down on the holler with a less benevolent eye than Nora Bonesteel’s. They perched on their respective summits, the granite man and the parchment woman, in a standoff older than the pines that edged the meadows. 

She seldom left her mountain fastness except to walk down the gravel road to church on Sunday morning, but she had a goodly number of visitors—mostly people wanting advice—but they’d come bringing homemade blackberry jelly or the latest picture of the grandbaby so as not to seem pushy about it. Folks said that no matter how early you reached her house of a morning with a piece of bad news, she’d meet you on the porch with a mug of fresh-brewed chicory coffee, already knowing what it was you’d come about. 

Nora Bonesteel did not gossip. The telephone company had never got around to stringing the lines up Ashe Mountain. She just knew. 

Dark Hollow folk, most of them kin to her, anyhow, took it for granted, but it made some of the townspeople down in Hamelin afraid, the way she sat up there on the mountain and kept track of all the doings in the valley; sat up there with her weaving, and her pet groundhog, and her visions. 

The night that Garrett Webster died in that wreck on the road to Asheville, Nora had the carrot cake baked to take to the funeral by the time somebody stopped in the next morning to tell her about the accident. She had a dream, she said, while she was sleeping in that old iron bedstead with the hollow pipes at the head and foot of it. Suddenly, she had heard a clang and felt the bed vibrate, as if somebody had hit those footboard pipes with the point of a sword. She’d sat up in bed, looking to see what woke her, and there was Garrett Webster standing at the foot of her bed, smiling at her from inside a glow of white light. When he saw that she’d seen him and knew who he was, he faded away, and the room was dark again. It was eight minutes past five, Nora said, and she got up right then to start fixing that cake for Esther Webster and her boys. The state trooper’s report said that the wreck between Garrett Webster’s car and a semi on Route 58 had occurred at 5: 08 that morning. It also stated that Webster never knew what hit him, but Nora Bonesteel reckoned he had. 

She knew other things, too. Who was pregnant, when to cover your tomato plants for frost, and where your missing wedding ring would turn up. She could cure nosebleeds by quoting the sixteenth chapter of Ezekiel, sixth verse; and she knew how to gauge the coming winter by the bands on a woolly worm. But that was nothing to marvel at. Every family had somebody with the simple gifts; even ones who knew when there had been a death within their family, but what made Nora Bonesteel different from others with the Sight was that for her it wasn’t only a matter of knowing about close kin. The fate of the whole community seemed as open to her as the weekly newspaper. Even newcomers, like the Underhills, outsiders who had bought an old farm and had come as strangers to settle between the mountains, were within the range of her visions. 

Nobody in Dark Hollow ever mistook her for a witch. She taught Sunday school to the early teens, and she kept her place in an old leather King James Bible with the feather of a redbird’s wing. Nora Bonesteel never wished harm, never tried to profit by her knowledge. Most times, she wouldn’t even tell people things if it was bad news that couldn’t be avoided. And if she did impart a warning, she’d look away while she told it, and say what she had to in a sorrowful way that was nobody’s idea of a curse. She just knew things, that’s all. In the east Tennessee hills, there had always been people who knew things. Most people felt a little sorry for her, and were glad they could go through life with the hope that comes from not seeing the future through well-polished glass.

(9) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.

[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]

  • Born March 28, 1912 — A. Bertram Chandler. Did you ever hear of popcorn literature? Well the Australian-tinged space opera that was the universe of the Rim World and John Grimes was such. A very good starting place is the Baen Books omnibus To The Galactic Rim which contains three novels and seven stories. If there’s a counterpart to him, it’d be I think Dominic Flandry who appeared in Anderson’s Technic History series. Oh, and I’ve revisited both to see if the Suck Fairy had dropped by. She hadn’t. (Died 1984.)
  • Born March 28, 1928 — Ron Soble. He played Wyatt Earp in the Trek episode, “Spectre of The Gun”.  During his career, he showed up on a huge number of genre series that included Mission: Impossible, The Six Million Dollar Man, Shazam, Planet of The Apes, Fantasy Island, Salvage 1 and Knight Rider. His last genre role, weirdly enough, was playing Pablo Picasso in Pterodactyl Woman from Beverly Hills. (Died 2002.)
  • Born March 28, 1933 — J. R. Hammond. Looking for companionable guides to H.G. Wells? Clute at EoSF has the scholar for you. He wrote three works that he recommends as being rather good (H G Wells: A Comprehensive Bibliography, Herbert George Wells: An Annotated Bibliography of his Works and An H G Wells Companion: A Guide to the Novels, Romances and Short Stories). Clute says that his “tendency to provide sympathetic overviews, now as much as ever, is welcome.” (Died 2018.)
  • Born March 28, 1942 — Mike Newell, 81. Director whose genre work Includes The Awakening, Photographing Fairies (amazing story, stellar film), Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (popcorn film — less filling, mostly tasty), Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time and two episodes of The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles, to wit “Masks of Evil” and “The Perils of Cupid”.
  • Born March 28, 1944 — Ellen R. Weil. Wife of  Gary K. Wolfe. She wrote a number of works with him including the non-fiction study, Harlan Ellison: The Edge of Forever. They wrote a fascinating essay, “The Annihilation of Time: Science Fiction; Consumed by Shadows: Ellison and Hollywood,” which can be found in Harlan Ellison: Critical Insights. (Died 2000.)
  • Born March 28, 1946 — Julia Jarman, 77. Author of a  children’s book series I like a lot, of which I’ll single out Time-Travelling Cat And The Egyptian Goddess, The Time-Travelling Cat and the Tudor Treasure and The Time-Travelling cat and the Viking Terror as the ones I like the best. There’s more to that series but those are my favorites. I see no indication that the cats are available from the usual suspects alas. 
  • Born March 28, 1972 — Nick Frost, 51. Yes, he really is named Nick Frost as he was born Nicholas John Frost. Befitting that, he was cast as Santa Claus in two Twelfth Doctor stories, “Death in Heaven” and “Last Christmas”. He’s done far more genre acting than I can retell here starting with the Spaced series and Shaun of The Dead (he’s close friends with Simon Pegg) to the superb Snow White and The Huntsman. He’s currently Gus in the Truth Seekers, a sort of low-budget comic ghost hunter series 

(10) FANAC’S FANNISH FEMINISM PANEL. Fanac.org hosted a two-part presentation about “Feminism in 1970s/80s Fandom” with Janice Bogstad, Jeanne Gomoll, and Lucy Huntzinger.

Fandom in the 70s/80s saw real influence from people with a feminist perspective, from the creation of Wiscon to fanzines like Janus and Rude Bitch, and to raising awareness of the reality women experienced.  What were the beginnings? How did Wiscon get started? Was fandom following popular culture or leading it? 

Part 1 – Panelists Janice Bogstad and Jeanne Gomoll tell us about the creation of Janus, Wiscon and the Madison nexus of feminist thought in 70s fandom, and Lucy Huntzinger brings us into the 80s with the lamentably short-run Rude Bitch, and her other experiences in fandom as a feminist.  Moderated by Edie Stern, FANAC.org webmaster, this intriguing panel reveals the unusual origins of Janus (and how the editor found out it was a fanzine!), the academic background brought to the discussions of women in science fiction, and some of the factors that made Madison the hotbed of feminist thought in fandom. 

These personal histories trace the growth of feminist discussion in broader fandom, and explore why fandom felt like a safe space for women. The panelists also discuss the sometimes negative reactions received…Wound through with personal anecdotes (“Will the real James Tiptree please stand up!”, and the production of “The Emperor Norton Science Fiction Hour”), the discussion provides a window on an important area of science fiction fan history.

Part 2 –  Panelists Jeanne, Lucy and Janice continue here with more on the reactions they received from others, and with the differences in being a feminist in fandom in the 70s and in the 80s…Part 2 has stories about dating approaches in fandom, the wonderful origins of Corflu, and a number of anecdotes (both serious and constructive as well as personal and funny) about well known women writers. There are charming anecdotes about Octavia E. Butler, Connie Willis, Sheri Tepper (and her rousing call to action on population growth), and Ursula K. Le Guin. 

You’ll also hear about the origins and early days of the Tiptree Award, and its novel funding mechanism. Finally, there are audience comments and reminiscences including a true story about the Minneapolis chicken hat…This session is lots of fun, with a serious thread underlying it. 

(11) FLIGHT HISTORY SUFFERS FIRE DAMAGE. The New York Times reports “Wright Brothers’ Airplane Factory Is Badly Damaged in Fire”.

A fire that broke out at a building complex in Dayton, Ohio, on Sunday damaged a factory founded by Wilbur and Orville Wright, the brothers who were the first people to successfully fly an airplane.

The fire throws into doubt the future of the factory, where the brothers built planes starting in the 1910s. It became part of the National Park Service’s group of aviation-related sites in Dayton in 2009.

The factory is a monument not just to the brothers and their consequential invention, but also to the role of leading industrialists of the day in giving birth to the age of commercial aviation. The factory was built shortly after Wilbur Wright visited New York in 1909 and “got buttonholed by the Vanderbilts, the Colliers, J.P. Morgan, folks like that,” said Dean Alexander, who was the park service superintendent in Dayton when the site was added. “The first thing they paid for was building that factory,” Mr. Alexander said.

The Dayton Fire Department said that it is investigating the cause of the fire, which started at 2:28 a.m. Sunday and damaged the roof and interior of buildings in the complex. No one was injured, the department said….

(12) LUCAS MUSEUM OF NARRATIVE ART. “Lucas Museum in Los Angeles Slated to Open in 2025” says the New York Times.

In the spring of 2018, after years of bidding wars, shifting proposals and changing plans, the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art broke ground in South Los Angeles.

And despite many subsequent delays, pandemic-related and otherwise, the enormous scope of the project by the “Star Wars” filmmaker George Lucas is finally coming into focus, and the museum is slated to open sometime in 2025, my colleague Adam Nagourney recently reported in The New York Times.

That may come as a surprise.

“My sense from the response to this story is that many people here were unaware of how far along the museum has come, and how big it is,” Adam, who is based in Los Angeles, told me.

As a refresher, Lucas considered building his billion-dollar museum in Chicago or San Francisco, but settled on Los Angeles, where officials were more aggressive in courting the project, which was expected to bring with it prestige and thousands of construction and museum jobs. The futuristic building, reminiscent of a low-flying spaceship, is being built on what were once parking lots in Exposition Park, across the street from the University of Southern California, Lucas’s alma mater.

The Lucas, designed by Ma Yansong, one of China’s most prominent architects, is part of a recent wave of museum construction in Los Angeles. The Academy Museum of Motion Pictures opened in 2021, and the Hammer Museum this month completed yearslong renovations. The Los Angeles County Museum of Art is also in the midst of a major overhaul….

(13) BALANCE OF POWER. “Would building a Dyson sphere be worth it? We ran the numbers” says Ars Technica. Daniel Dern posits, “If you have to ask, you can’t afford it.”

… For these and many other reasons, a Dyson sphere costs energy. So we’re going to see how long it will take to recoup the energy investment of building one and what the optimal design might be to minimize the initial investment.

To get at some numbers, we’re going to make a lot of assumptions. People like to poke fun at physicists for simplifying complex problems, sometimes beyond recognition. The old joke goes that dairy farmers reached out to a nearby university to help understand why milk production was low, and the response from the physicists began by assuming that the cows were spherical.

But there is something powerful about this simplifying approach, which is why physicists are trained in it from day one. First, it lets us answer questions when we’re not interested in precise numbers at the outset. Here, we just want a general sense of feasibility—will building a Dyson sphere take a (relatively) small, medium, or extreme amount of energy? Second, simplifying the problem helps cover up mistakes (either in calculations or our starting assumptions). If all we’re going after is a general ballpark, then a factor-of-two mistake (or even 10 or 100) won’t really change the overall intuitions our calculations enable….

Also: How about instead making a Ringworld-scale Dyson vacuum cleaner? (to suck up all that dark matter and other clutter…?)

(14) VERSE OF THE DAY. Too long to use as a title, however, it deserves Scroll honors. By Randall M:

One File makes you pixel
And one File makes you scroll
And the ones Mike Glyer sends you
Don’t go anywhere at all
Go ask Jetpack
When it’s on a roll

[Thanks to Andrew Porter, Michael Toman, Cat Eldridge, Andrew (not Werdna), Randall M., Mike Kennedy, John King Tarpinian, and Chris Barkley for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Cat Eldridge.]

Pixel Scroll 3/19/23 It’s Tribbles All The Way Down (Except Level 47, Which Is Selbbirts)

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(1) PICS AND IT STILL NEVER HAPPENED. David Brin stares into the abyss, discussing “All those ‘chat’ programs… and the End of Photography as Proof of Anything At All” at Contrary Brin.

One of the scariest predictions now circulating is that we are about to leave the era of photographic proof.  For generations we relied on cameras to be the fairest of fair witnesses.  Images of the Earth from space helped millions become more devoted to its care.  Images from Vietnam made countless Americans less gullible and more cynical.  Miles of footage taken at Nazi concentration camps confirmed history’s greatest crimes.  A few seconds of film shot in Dallas, in November of 1963, set the boundary conditions for a nation’s masochistic habit of scratching a wound that never heals.  

Although there have been infamous photo-fakes — such as trick pictures that convinced Arthur Conan Doyle there were real “fairies” and Mary Todd Lincoln that her husband’s ghost hovered over her, or the ham-handedly doctored images that Soviet leaders used to erase “non-persons” from official history — for the most part scientists and technicians have been able to expose forgeries by magnifying and revealing the inevitable traces that meddling left behind.

But not anymore, say some experts.  We are fast reaching the point where expertly controlled computers can adjust an image, pixel by microscopic pixel, and not leave a clue behind.  Much of the impetus comes from Hollywood, where perfect verisimilitude is demanded for fantastic onscreen fabulations like Forrest Gump and Jurassic Park.  Yet some thoughtful film wizards worry how these technologies will be used outside the theaters….

…The new technologies of photo-deception have gone commercial. For instance, a new business called “Out Takes” set up shop next to Universal Studios, in Los Angeles, promising to “put you in the movies.” For a small fee they will insert your visage in a tete-a-tete with Humphrey Bogart or Marilyn Monroe, exchanging either tense dialogue or a romantic moment.  This may seem harmless on the surface, but the long range possibilities disturb Ken Burns, innovative director of the famed Public Broadcasting series The Civil War.  “If everything is possible, then nothing is true. And that, to me, is the abyss we stare into. The only weapon we might have, besides some internal restraint, is skepticism.”   

Skepticism may then further transmute into cynicism — Burns worries — or else, in the arts, decadence…. 

(2) NO LONGER BEING OVERLOOKED. Lila Shapiro spends time “In Northampton with Kelly Link and her community of like-minded writers”.

 ….In the stories of Kelly Link, strange things happen in otherwise ordinary settings. A teenage girl from Iowa travels to New York to find an older guy she met online and ends up at a hotel hosting a pair of conventions: one for dentists and one for superheroes. A girl from the Boston area discovers a lost world preserved inside her grandmother’s old handbag (which is made from the skin of a dog that lives inside it). Her stories do not abide by the rules of conflict and resolution — they make sense in the way that dreams make sense. Pressed to explain these phenomena, Link’s characters tend to change the subject. “The mechanics of how I can speak are really of no great interest, and I’m afraid I don’t really understand it myself, in any case,” a talking cat insists in a story from Link’s new collection, White Cat, Black Dog. Since 2001, Link has published four books of short stories, with the fifth — a series of unsettling retellings of classic fairy tales — out this month. For much of that time, she has worked in relative obscurity. Early reviewers were impressed by her originality, but she remained largely unknown outside of M.F.A. programs and fantasy circles. When her first book was published more than 20 years ago, serious literature, for the most part, meant one-pound tomes of psychological realism.

That has changed as Link’s stature has grown. In 2016, she was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize; a few years later, the MacArthur Foundation awarded her a “genius” grant for “pushing the boundaries of literary fiction.”…

… After getting an M.F.A. at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, Link enrolled in the Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers’ Workshop. “I thought, This will be a group of people who are doing the same kind of work. But in fact, the feedback I got from many of the people was, Well, I don’t know what this is.” While she and her fellow students admired some of the same authors — Heinlein, Asimov, Tolkien — Link’s indifference to genre conventions was apparent. If her heroines start an epic quest, they’re likely to get distracted or lost or turn into someone else entirely. “I remember thinking she already wrote better than I did and there was really no point in her coming to this workshop,” said Karen Joy Fowler, one of Link’s professors at Clarion…..

(3) TIME IN A BOTTLE. Dorothy Grant persuasively explains why people should listen to Neil Gaiman’s entire advice about the freelance life in “Saying No” at Mad Genius Club.

…He [Neil Gaiman] went on, though, to warn about the problems of success… and that’s what gets dropped out of a lot of the advice. He noted the problems of success are harder, in part because nobody warns you about them… and what do people do? Not listen to the warning, and drop it out of their quotes. They include:

“The point where you stop saying yes to everything, because now the bottles you threw in the ocean are all coming back, and have to learn to say no.”

(4) PLUS ÇA CHANGE, PLUS C’EST LA MÊME CHOSE. “50 Best Short Stories for High School Students” at We Are Teachers is surprisingly chock full of sff – Bradbury, Le Guin, Poe, Dahl – though I’m a little more surprised at how many of these stories were already part of the canon when I was in high school and are still on a list like this.  

If there is one thing that my students and I share, it’s our love for short stories. High school kids may not choose to read short stories on their own time, but they get very excited when the story I choose to teach a concept is short. I find that short stories pack a stronger emotional punch. They elicit real reactions, especially if the author manages to surprise them. In fact, short stories are the thing I use most often in my high school lessons to teach literary devices, act as mentor texts for our writing, and get students excited about reading. Here is a collection of 50 of my favorite short stories for high school students….

(5) GIRARDI Q&A. The Horror Writers Association blog has a new “Women in Horror” entry: “Women in Horror: Interview with Jill Girardi”.

Jill Girardi is the internationally best-selling, award-nominated author of Hantu Macabre, a novel which was optioned for a film starring MMA Fighter Ann Osman and directed by Aaron Cowan (a senior member of the Visual Effects team that won four Oscars for Avatar and Lord of the Rings.)…

What was it about the horror genre that drew you to it?

This is something I’ve found difficult to explain over the years. Going back to the subject of du Maurier’s work, I found her simple, direct form of writing to be both beautiful and haunting, evoking so many emotions in the reader. The symbolism of it struck such a deep chord with me. For example, in one of my favorite stories, The Apple Tree, a mere tree takes on the qualities of a deceased woman, one who withered from neglect and lack of love all her life. The image was one that stayed with me long after I first finished reading the story. Many people believe that horror is all about shock value, that there’s no emotion or any deep meaning in it. Those of us who read or write horror know otherwise. We know that something as simple as a tree can haunt you, and bring you close to your own pain. This is what I adore about horror. There is so much more lurking under its surface….

(6) GODZILLA NOVELIZATIONS. [Item by Ben Bird Person.] Since its publication nearly 70 years ago, there is finally an English translation by Jeffrey Angles to the Shigeru Kayama’s novelizations for Godzilla (1954) and Godzilla Raids Again (1955). According to its Amazon listing, it’ll be published by University of Minnesota Press and released October 3, 2023.

(7) MEMORY LANE.

2003 – [Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]

Sharyn McCrumb’s Ghost Riders is the seventh of her Ballad Novels, her mystery series set in the Appalachian Mountains. It features a strong dash of magic realism as you’ll see in the Beginning from this novel which was published twenty years ago by Dutton Adult.

I like the novels because they feel authentic which reflects McCrumb’s being born and raised in the Appalachian region. The novels are richly detailed, the characters are fully developed, particularly the continuing ones such as Rattler, and the stories are certainly some of the better ones set in the Appalachian region. 

And if her name sounds familiar, that’s because of Bimbos of the Death Sun and Zombies of the Gene Pool which she wrote.

And now our Beginning…

Prologue: Rattler 

The boy stood still in the moonlight watching the riders approach. The chill of the night air had shaken the last bit of sleep-stupor from him, and he shivered, feeling the wind on his legs and the sensation of his bare feet touching the rough boards of the porch, and knowing that he was not dreaming. He had stumbled outside to make his way to the privy, but now something–not a sound, more like a feeling–made him stop a few feet from the door, and for long minutes as he stood there he would forget the push in his bladder that had sent him out into the cold darkness of an October night. 

Night riders. 

Horses were not an every day sight in the mountains nowadays, as they had been in his daddy’s time. Now that the Great War had ended in Europe, the world had changed. People talked about aeroplanes and automobiles and store-bought clothes. Every year brought more Model A’s into the county, and those folks that didn’t run an automobile could take the train into Johnson City or Asheville if they needed to go. You sent money to the mail-order catalogue, and the postman would bring you the goods, all parceled up in brown paper, whatever you’d asked for. They called it “the wish book.” But nobody ever wished for the old days, not in these mountains. They all wanted the future to get here double quick. 

But tonight was an echo of the old days… there were horsemen at the edge of the woods. 

The boy wondered who these riders were, out on the ridge past midnight, far from a road and miles from the next farm. He could make out three of them just this side of the trees beyond the smokehouse, but in the faint light of the crescent moon their features were indistinguishable. They carried no lantern, and they rode in silence. It took the boy three heartbeats longer to register the fact that the horses made no sound either. He heard no rustle of grass, no snapping of twigs beneath their hooves. 

One of the riders detached himself from the group by the woods and trotted toward the porch where the boy stood. He was a tall, gaunt man in a long greatcoat and scuffed leather boots, and he had a calculating way of looking through narrowed eyes that froze the boy to the spot like a snake-charmed bird. The rider looked to be in his twenties, with dark hair and black whiskers outlining his chin, as if he were growing a beard by default and not by design. The boy stared at the face, a pale oval in the moonlight, and he forgot to move or cry out. 

The man smiled down at him as if he had trouble remembering how. “Evenin’, Boy,” he said in a soft mountain drawl. “What’s your name then?” 

“Rat–they called me Rattler, mister.” It took him two tries to get the sound to come out of his throat. 

The rider grinned. “Rattler, huh? Mean as a snake, are you, boy?” 

The boy lifted his chin. Even if he was shivering in his nightshirt, he was on his own porch and he would not cower before a stranger. “I don’t reckon I’m mean,” he said. “But I give salt for salt.” 

“Fair enough.” The dark man looked amused. “I guess I do the same.” He glanced back at the woods where his companions waited, motionless, shadows in moonlight. “And you’d be–what? About twelve?” 

“About,” said the boy. He would be eleven in January.

“Well, snake-boy, what do you say? You want to ride with us?” 

The boy shrugged. “Got no horse.” 

“Reckon we could rustle you up one.” 

The smile again, cold as a moonbeam. The boy hesitated. “You never said who you are, Mister.”

(8) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.

[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]

  • Born March 19, 1821 — Sir Richard Francis Burton KCMG FRGS. He was a geographer, translator, writer, soldier, cartographer, ethnologist, spy, linguist, poet, fencer and diplomat. He worked on the translation of an unexpurgated version of One Thousand and One Nights. Also, Vikram and the Vampire or Tales of Hindu Devilry. Mind you, he was also the publisher of both Kama Sutra and The Perfume Garden. Philip Jose Farmer made him a primary character of the Riverworld series. (Died 1890.)
  • Born March 19, 1926 — Joe L. Hensley. Long-time fan and writer who was a First Fandom “Dinosaur” (which meant he had been active in fandom prior to July 4, 1939), and received the First Fandom Hall of Fame Award in 2006. Very impressive! His first genre fiction sale was the short story “And Not Quite Human,” published in the September 1953 issue of Beyond Fantasy Fiction. His co-authors included Alexei Panshin and Harlan Ellison. Though he wrote nearly fifty pieces of short fiction, and much of that is not genre, he wrote just one genre novel, The Black Roads. (Died 2007.)
  • Born March 19, 1928 — Patrick  McGoohan. Creator along with George Markstein of The Prisoner series in which he played the main role of Number Six. (The one and only Prisoner. I know it’s been remade but I refuse to admit it exists.) I’ve watched it at least several times down the years. It never gets any clearer but it’s always interesting and always weird.  Other genre credits do not include Danger Man but comprise a short list of The Phantom where he played The Phantom’s father, Treasure Planet where he voiced Billy Bones and Journey into Darkness where he was The Host of. (Died 2009.)
  • Born March 19, 1932 — Gail Kobe. She has genre appearances with the more prominent being as Jessica Connelly in Twilight Zone’s “In His Image”, in another Twilight Zone episode as Leah Maitland in “The Self-Improvement of Salvadore Ross”, and two Outer Limits episodes, first as Janet Doweling in “Specimen, Unknown” and then as Janet in “The Keeper of the Purple Twilight”. (Died 2019.)
  • Born March 19, 1936 — Ursula Andress, 87. I’m sure I’ve seen all of the original Bond films though I’ll be damned I remember where or when I saw them. Which is my way of leading up to saying that I don’t remember her in her roles as either as Honey Ryder in the very first Bond film, Dr. No, or as as Vesper Lynd in Casino Royale. Bond girls aren’t that memorable to me it seems. Hmmm… let’s see if she’s done any other genre work… well her first was The Tenth Victim based on Sheckley’s 1953 short story “Seventh Victim”. She also appeared in L’Infermiera, oops wrong genre, The Mountain of the Cannibal God, The Fifth Musketeer, Clash of the Titans where she played of course Aphrodite, on the Manimal series, The Love Boat series and the two Fantaghirò films. 
  • Born March 19, 1945 — Jim Turner. Turner was editor for Arkham House after the death of August Derleth, founder of that press. After leaving Arkham House for reasons that are not at all clear, he founded Golden Gryphon Press which published really lovely books until it went out of existence. (Died 1999.)
  • Born March 19, 1947 — Glenn Close, 76. I had not a clue that she’d done genre-friendly acting. Indeed she has, with two of the most recent being Nova Prime in Guardians of The Galaxy, Topsy in Mary Poppins Returns and voicing Felicity Fox in the animated film adaptation of Roald Dahl’s Fantastic Mr. Fox. Before those roles, she was Aunt Josephine in Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events, Blue Mecha in A.I. Artificial Intelligence and Madeline Ashton in Death Becomes Her. Oh the latter is almost too weird in what it is. 
  • Born March 19, 1955 — Bruce Willis, 68. (It’s very sad what’s happening to him.) So do any of the Die Hard franchise count as genre? Even setting them aside, he has a very long  genre list, to wit Death Becomes Her (yes another actor in it), 12 Monkeys (weird shit), The Fifth Element (damn great), Armageddon (eight tentacles down), The Sixth Sense (not at all bad), Sin City (typical Miller overkill) and Sin City: A Dame to Kill For (yet more Miller overkill). 

(9) COMICS SECTION.

(10) PLUNKING TOGETHER. In “Krissy and I Have a Band: Introducing OEMAA and ‘Parking Space’”, John Scalzi lets fans hear a driver’s overflowing white-hot rage when supply exceeds demand.  

…We agreed that we would form a punk band, whose musical theme would be venting furiously about the minor annoyances that beset ones such as ourselves, which is to say, comfortable middle-aged folks.

Fast forward to 2023, and right now, and I’m happy to announce that Krissy and I do, in fact, have a punk band in which we bemoan the inconveniences of the hugely privileged. We call ourselves OEMAA (pronounced “wee-ma”), which is an acronym for Outrageously Entitled Middle-Aged Assholes, and our first song, “Parking Space,” is the sonic blast of aggrievement emanating from the soul of a man in an SUV who sees the parking space he’s been hovering over get snapped up by another equally entitled jerk in a Lexus. Hell hath no fury like a dude in an SUV, missing out on a parking opportunity…

(11) INEXPLICABLE WRITING. Ryan George takes viewers inside the Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets Pitch Meeting.

With the first movie as well as the book series being massive international successes, Warner Bros was fast to get to work on adapting the second book in the Harry Potter series: The Chamber of Secrets. What adventures lay ahead for Harry Potter at his death trap of a magical high school?! People were anxious to see it play out on the big screen. Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets definitely raises some questions though. Like why would Hogwarts hire Lockhart and why would he accept, knowing full well that he’s a fraud? Was the Whomping Willow really the best thing they could think of to put on school grounds? Why does the car have a mind of its own? Why did Hagrid send children off to speak to man-eating spiders in the most dangerous forest there is? How did Nearly Headless Nick get unpetrified? Is Fawkes the secret star of this movie?! To answer all these questions and more, step inside the Pitch Meeting that led to Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets! It’ll be super easy, barely an inconvenience.

(12) VIDEO OF THE DAY. Colonials debuts in select theaters on April 7 and on digital platforms on April 11.

On his mission from Mars, a space colonist’s ship is attacked by a Moon-based civilization and crash lands on Earth. Having lost his memory, he joins forces with a Resistance to save the galaxy from human extinction.

[Thanks to Mike Kennedy, John King Tarpinian, Chris Barkley, Lise Andreasen, Andrew Porter, Michael Toman, and Cat Eldridge for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Daniel Dern.]