I found this on my front porch on Saturday. Inside, two boxes containing the signature pages for the PS Publishing 30th Anniversary Edition of Pet Sematary, for which I wrote the afterword. Ramsey Campbell, who wrote the forward, has already sign them. After me, they go to the two artists. Guess what I’m doing this evening? I like the blue bag. It looks like something Santa Smurf would use.
I posted three book reviews this weekend: Hit Me by Lawrence Block, Save Yourself by Kelly Braffet and The Truth by Michael Palin. I also managed last week to get my message board back up and running again. I was afraid for a while that I was going to lose six weeks’ worth of posts, but I don’t think I lost anything at all thanks to my ISP’s regular backup protocol.
The Revised & Updated second edition of The Illustrated Stephen King Trivia Book, edited by Brian Freeman and me, will ship in August. Cemetery Dance is still taking pre-orders.
I watched Drinking Buddies via OnDemand this weekend. It stars Olivia Wilde and Ron Livingston (who always reminds me of the guy from Early Edition). I didn’t know much about it going in—I thought it might end up being the “beer” version of Sideways, but there wasn’t much about beer in the film, beyond the amount the characters consumed. Apparently much of the dialog is improvised. The film is about two couples, one of which consists of Wilde and Livingston. The other couple has a woman who wants to talk about marriage and a guy who doesn’t, though he claims he will think about it. The guy and Wilde’s character are coworkers at the brewery and they are buddies, but after a double-date weekend at a cabin, things shift. All four characters seem to want something different, but none of them are sure how to go about it. It’s filled with the kind of honest awkwardness of young people trying to figure out relationships. It has funny moments and painful ones.
David Morrell recommended The Bridge, a new FX series set in El Paso and Juarez, based on the Danish series Bron. It opens with the discovery of a body in the middle of the bridge between the two countries (made me think of Bon Cop, Bad Cop, the Canadian film about a homicide where the victim is found on the Quebec / Ontario border). Because of the location and the nature of the murder victim(s), a joint task force is formed. Representing El Paso homicide is a cop played by Diane Kruger, whose character happens to have Asperger syndrome (although that isn’t spelled out). On the Mexican side, Demian Bichir’s world-weary cop, who has just had a vasectomy (only to discover that his wife is pregnant again). He was the druglord in Weeds. Also in the cast, Ted Levine (Monk, Silence of the Lambs) as Kruger’s character’s boss and father figure, and Annabeth Gish. A serial killer is trying to get people to take note of the number of murders in Juarez that go unsolved and uninvestigated. Three episodes in, and so far so good.
Series three of Luther took no hostages. There is a stunning development in the middle of the four episode run, and the return of a much-loved sociopath near the end. No word on whether there’ll be a fourth series or if they’ll spin off, either to a motion picture or an Alice-centric series.
This week’s The Killing was quite intense. The final moments reminded me of the bad death of Eduard Delacroix. Only one more episode left to go. At first I wasn’t all that sold on the season, but it’s been getting better. Dexter has been taking some interesting turns, too. After tearing everything apart, it looks like things are starting to come back together, a bit.
