Bev Vincent

This has been a busy week at Stephen King Revisited. A couple of days ago, my Historical Context essay about The Gunslinger went up: Five Easy Pieces. Then Rich Chizmar posted his reminiscences about the book. Finally, today, my Guest Essay about the first Dark Tower book went live: Stephen King crossed the desert and I followed.

I also posted a review of Christopher Golden’s excellent new horror novel, Dead Ringers, at Onyx Reviews yesterday.

I completed a long interview for a magazine appearance early next year in which I was asked some fascinating questions. It ran long (I guess I ran long!) so it might not all get published in that venue and the interviewer is exploring alternate venues for any parts that might get edited out. There’s a chance that a new short story might run with the interview, too, but that remains to be seen.

With season 2 of The Returned under way, I introduced my wife to the first season of the French series last night and we’ll stack up the second season for later. It’s a genuinely creepy show, especially the little boy Victor, beautifully filmed in idyllic surroundings. I also like the fact that the French speakers enunciate very clearly, so I can pick up a lot of the dialog, which can be at times subtly different from the subtitles. I’m pretty sure that character didn’t just say, “Get lost.”

We’re keeping up with The Blacklist and Doctor Who, and we’re eagerly awaiting the return of The Americans, which I hope will be back in January or February. Last weekend, we watched Back In Time, the Back to the Future documentary, which was interesting for a while but then it got tedious when it focused so much on some of the obsessed fans. It had its moments, but it wasn’t nearly as good as some of the other documentaries we’ve seen lately. Possibly because I wasn’t all that into Back to the Future. I saw each of the movies once, and that’s it.

My wife was away for the weekend, so I decided to catch up on a few movies that I knew wouldn’t interest her while doing my best to stay dry. The remnants of the Pacific hurricane known as Patricia crossed into the Gulf of Mexico, bringing with it an impressive amount of rain. The most recent total I saw for our community was something like 5.7″ between Saturday morning and yesterday afternoon. Parts of downtown Houston got as much as 10″. There was some localized flooding, but it wasn’t as bad as it might have been. Everything was pretty dry before this batch of rain came.

On Friday night, I saw Guillermo del Toro’s Crimson Peak. This film has a few genuine scares, but it is mostly a Gothic movie that revels in atmosphere and setting. It’s about a young woman who marries a mysterious man and moves to England to live with him at his isolated and crumbling estate. The ceiling in the main entrance hall has collapsed, and a constant stream of stuff falls through it: leaves, petals, snow. It’s a magical and captivating concept. The young woman has prior experience with ghosts, and her new home has more than its fair share of them. They are depicted in an innovative manner: crawling specters that look like they are composed of the humans’ circulatory systems, with things (blood?) streaming off them at the edges in wisps and swirls. The whole thing is visually impressive, worth seeing on the big screen. Stick around for at least the first section of the credits for more of these fantastic visuals. Oh, it’s also a very stabby movie.

On Saturday morning, I saw Sicario, which is a good follow-up to the Netflix series Narcos, where I first heard that word, which is defined as “hit man” in the context of this movie. Emily Blunt is an FBI agent who volunteers to attach herself to a task force led by Josh Brolin whose intent is to do some major damage to Mexican drug lords operating near the US border. Also on the team is a mysterious figure played by Benecio del Toro (unrelated to Guillermo), a man with some odd quirks and a way of speaking in philosophical metaphors. Blunt’s character is highly motivated because her team was damaged by a booby trap, and she’s coming to understand that the normal ways of doing things simply aren’t effective. She’s the audience’s avatar, the person to whom the film is explained, and there’s a lot more going on than she at first realizes, which places her in some difficult situations. It’s all very impressive and disturbing because it seems real and realistic. Possibly one of Blunt’s best-ever performances, and del Toro is terrific.

By the time I left that matinee showing, the rain had started, so I hunkered down at home for the rest of the weekend. Yesterday I finally got around to seeing Chappie, which was not at all what I was expecting. William Gibson has been talking about the movie a lot on Twitter (very favorably). I thought it was going to be something like Short Circuit, and the trailers I saw in the distant past didn’t give me any sense of its South African setting or its “hip hop” sensibility. It stars Dev Patel (from the Marigold Hotel movies) as the inventor of robotic police, one of which he implants with consciousness. However, this robot is stolen by a bunch of criminals played by members of a rap/rave group called Die Antwoord. They give surprisingly effective performances as they “pervert” this sentient robot, implanting their particular South African accents and jargon onto it and convincing it to do things that are against its fundamental programming. Lurking in the wings is Hugh Jackman, who has built a prototype of a much more expensive robot that the company won’t give him the green light to test. The movie got a critical drubbing, and only middling audience response, but it’s really quite good. Funny and sad. A little maudlin toward the end, and a tad tidy, but it’s well worth the journey, especially since I got a coupon to see it free OnDemand.

I love it when I think I’ve run out of time to start writing in the morning because I’m busy doing other things and I still manage to get 1000 words done. My goal for this novel is a conservative 5000 words per week. More if I can get ’em, but that pace would be satisfactory.

My essay The Halloween Tree is now up at the blog formerly know as Not Now…Mommy’s Reading, rebranded for October (to acknowledge its takeover by a motley crew of horror writers) as Not Now…Mommy’s Screaming. There’s also a contest where you can win a trade paperback copy of The Dark Tower Companion, so check it out, and also the other entries from my compatriots in horror.

My most recent essay for Stephen King Revisited is online this week, too. It’s called Can You See Me Running? and it details the historical context behind the publication of The Running Man, the last of the paperback original books published as Richard Bachman.

I was also interviewed recently for Ficção Terror, a Brazilian blog about horror movies and books. The interview is now available in both Portuguese and in English, so you can read it in the language of your choosing.

I finished the first season of Fortitude this weekend. An impressive original series set in a remote Arctic island, population 700-something. Mostly miners and people who support the mining town (inn keepers, shopkeepers, cops). It’s in the permafrost, a place where it is illegal to die because there’s no place to bury anyone. It starts with a killing and a discovery, and things go very, very badly from there. A lot of people break the law by dying. The local governor (played by Sofie Gråbøl from the Danish original of The Killing) wants to build a hotel in the glacier, but she comes to realize that perhaps a bigger morgue is what’s called for. The story flirts with science fiction and it is definitely horrific at times, but all somewhat credible. A good cast, including Stanley Tucci as a DI in from London to supervise some investigations and Michael Gambon as an aging photographer battling cancer. Filming of Season 2 is underway in Iceland and I can’t wait to see where they take the story.

We saw The Martian yesterday. A very good science-driven space opera about a guy struggling to survive under the worst imaginable conditions: lots of potatoes but no ketchup. A strong ensemble cast, and an intriguing and captivating plot. No aliens or star wars, just the kinds of things a space program has to deal with: the unforgiving nature of space. Damon is the Jimmy Stewart of our time. Always pretty much the same character, but a calm, reassuring force within a film. The audience avatar. The guy we trust to get us home. If I have an issue with the movie at all, it’s that it downplayed the passage of time and the psychological stresses that must cause. The people on Earth were under enormous pressure to produce solutions in an insanely short period of time, but the people in space had to deal with a ton of tedium, and it would have been nice to see that acknowledged a bit more. Tedium and disco. What a combination. Actually, the choice of disco songs was so on the nose at times it was hilarious. Hot Stuff when he’s carting around the radioactive material, the obligatory David Bowie space song, Waterloo by Abba when defeat seems at hand and Donna Summer’s triumphant anthem over the closing parts. All in a all, a well conceived and executed adventure tale. But I expect Damon’s character never wants fries with that again.

There are probably weirder TV shows in current production than The Leftovers, but I’m hard pressed to think of one. For the first 10 minutes of last night’s season 2 premiere, I kept wondering if maybe I’d stumbled into the wrong show by accident. And then another show started, and it wasn’t until very late in the game that we see some familiar faces. Talk about a way to build suspense, though. Have a “psychic” character tell someone else that something bad is going to happen, then watch the second guy stick his hand in a garbage disposal. There’s definitely some weird stuff going on in Miracle, TX. Reminds me a bit of “The End of the Whole Mess” and the waters that prolong life. I get the impression that miracles aren’t all that welcome in Miracle. And what was the deal with the pie? And the cricket? So many questions.

My biggest question about The Affair is the timeline. When does the jail stuff happen with respect to everything else. Much later than the brunt of the episode? So I gather. I’m always intrigued by the way the show recreates certain scenes from different characters’ points of view. Even the clothing is different at times, but definitely the tone and specifics of, for example, the mediation meeting. Totally different. And that had to be one of the most awkward sex scenes I’ve ever seen. Lots of buzz on the ‘net today about the full frontal shot, brief and blurry though it was, but nary a whisper about all the nudity on The Leftovers.

I found it odd that I hadn’t heard there was a sitcom starring Patrick Stewart. Then, when I discovered it was on Starz, I began to have my doubts. But my wife’s coworker thought it was a scream, so we gave Blunt Talk a shot this weekend. We made it through three 30-minute episodes, but that’s it for us. It is regrettably unfunny. Blunt is despicable from the opening moments of the show, and he gets no better. There were a few funny moments over the ninety-minute span, but on the whole it’s a waste of talent.

CSI went out with a few bangs. Fifteen years is a pretty good run and they gave us the “riding off into the sunset” finale that put a nice ribbon on the series. I never cottoned to the spin-offs, not even the one remaining that will now benefit from Ted Danson’s migration, but I always had a soft spot for Gris and the gang.

Even though I’m from Canada, and I remember well when 2112 was released (I was in grade 9), and they’ve been a constant background presence during my life, I can’t say I’m a huge Rush fan. I like a handful of their songs, and I’m okay with a bunch more, but I’ve never had any desire to see them in concert, even though I had ample opportunity to do so over the years. I actually like Max Webster, their perennial opening band, better. However, Netflix is now streaming the 2010 documentary Behind the Lighted Stage, so we checked it out yesterday. Major props to the dudes from Ontario—they seem to be one of the healthiest (mentally) rock groups in existence. Granted, a 100-minute synopsis of a 40-year career can’t delve into everything, but if there was ever any acrimony or dissension within the group, you figure you’d see some hint of it. But they just did the job and continued to improve themselves and, despite a lack of respect from the critical establishment, kept on keeping on. There’s is an interesting trajectory—how they were pulled from obscurity in Cleveland because “Working Man” tapped into the city’s ethos at the time and how they stood up to the record company and pretty much everyone by refusing to kowtow to their demands and choosing to go out on their own terms, if 2112 had been a failure. How they tried out different things over the years and regrouped when some of the experimentation didn’t quite work out. How they managed to preserve long-term family relationships and how the other two members of the band refused to consider replacing Peart when he went off the grid for a few years following some personal tragedies. Good, solid blokes, all round. Quirky as hell, but they have my respect. And they finally made it onto the cover of Rolling Stone this year.

So it goes like this: We see Yes. I start listening to old Yes albums. That leads me back to Buggles, who I loved in the 1980s. You know, “Video Killed the Radio Star.” Good keyboards. So I wonder what else Geoff Downes has done. Yes, I know he was in Asia, but what else? That leads me to New Dance Orchestra, which is electronica with a strong disco/dance influence. The new album features vocals by Anne-Marie Helder. Reminds me of Sarah Brightman. Research her a bit and discover she does lead vocals for a Welsh group called Panic Room. Find a couple of tracks on YouTube. I like. And thus is a new group discovered by me. I read that the band was formed out of a previous endeavor called Karnataka, which I’ve also never heard. So maybe there’s something else to check out. I like finding new music.

I haven’t said much about this, but since it seems to be moving right along, I guess it’s safe to say that I’ve finally started working on that novel I’ve been thinking about for lo these many months and years. I’m doing it longhand, as I did with the novella I wrote earlier this year, and since September 9 I’ve completed over fifty handwritten pages. I have no idea if all of it will make it into the book once it’s finished, because some of it involves feeling around for the right direction and figuring out for myself what it’s really all about, but I think I’m well on my way. I’m not going to make any promises, even to myself, as to when I hope to get the first draft finished, but it would be nice to think I could get a lot of it done before the leap year begins.

I finished the Netflix original Narcos last night. Open for a second season, which I’d watch. The first season manages to turn the narrating character into a bit of a jerk by the end, but at least he’s not Walter White. Just a guy tainted by the things he has to deal with and do to get his job done.

This morning, while exercising I decided to go back to House of Cards, Season 3, which we’d abandoned after a few episodes. I didn’t mind it, but my wife got bored with it. We’re going to try out a comedy series called Blunt Talk that stars Patrick Stewart this weekend. I’m also watching a series called Fortitude that has Michael Gambon, Sofie Gråbøl, Christopher Eccleston and Stanley Tucci. It’s set on a remote northern island (filmed in Iceland) where it is unlawful for anyone to die or be buried.

Skype is down all over the world. I guess we broke it during our hour-long videoconference with our daughter in Japan last night! It’s the first time we called since she moved to Okinawa. It was a little like that episode of The Big Bang Theory where Raj shows his family around. Technology is pretty cool, though, except when it breaks down.

I posted a couple of book reviews over the weekend: Dexter is Dead by Jeff Lindsay and Zer0es by Chuck Wendig.

We finished Season 4 of Longmire on Friday night. The switch to Netflix was a positive change, with longer episodes, a more natural structure (no commercial breaks), and a good mix between episode-specific plot and multi-episode arcs. I was glad they resolved the situation that launched the season within a few episodes rather than drag it out, even though its tentacles reached all the way to the end of the season. Episode 3 was intense. I also like that the relationship between Walt and Mathias, the tribal police chief, has evolved from purely antagonistic to at least a working kinship. And it was also an interesting development that Henry should go from stopping Walt from acting like a vigilante in the first episode to embracing that persona later in the season. The relation between Vic and Walt is much more credible than in the novels, I think. Complicated, but not cliched. Ally Walker is a good addition to the show, and I suppose the outcome of the cliff-hanger will depend upon her availability, should the show be renewed. All in all: well done, Netflix.

I’m not the world’s biggest Rolling Stones fan. I like some of their stuff and I loathe some of it (I’m looking at you, Emotional Rescue). I have a collection of their greatest hits, but I don’t think I’ve ever bought an album. Still, the new documentary about Keith Richards, Under the Influence, just out on Netflix, looked intriguing. There’s always been something about the way he plays, that kind of shruggy, counter-tempo thing he does, that has intrigued me. The documentary started out as a promo video for his new solo album and expanded into a 90-minute film. Given its genesis, it doesn’t delve into any of the conflicts or troubles from the past, other than a brief statement by Richards that he referred to his relationship with Jagger in the later 1980s as World War III. It’s all about the music that has influenced him over the years, from Muddy Waters to reggae, and how he got to meet and play with some of the musicians who influenced the Stones. It has some nice historical footage and Richards is in good form, laughing giddily half the time, between puffs on his cigarette.

It’s early days—there isn’t even a cover yet—but it’s never too early to pimp forthcoming projects. Amazon is now taking pre-orders for Volume 2 of The X-Files: The Truth is Out There anthology, which contains my short story “Phase Shift.” I don’t know the entire list of contributors, but these folks are mentioned on the order page: Kelley Armstrong, Jon McGoran, Hank Schwaeble, Kami Garcia, Hank Phillippi Ryan, David Sakmyster, Sarah Stegall, Glenn Grenberg, Tim Waggoner, David Farland. The anthology, edited by Jonathan Maberry, will be out in February 2016.

Event-filled days chez Vincent lately. Our daughter, who got married this summer, moved to Okinawa over the weekend, which meant a lot of organizing and re-organizing in advance of the Sunday morning flight. The biggest issue was the cat, which required a lot of special preparations and planning for the flight. My daughter and her husband hired a company to handle most of it, but there were still a lot of last-minute issues. The cat departed on Wednesday and arrived at her destination on Friday evening (local time).

It takes a long time to get to Okinawa. In general, about 24 real hours of travel time, plus the fourteen-hour time change. Our daughter left on Sunday morning and got to her new home on Monday evening, after three flights and a harrowing taxi ride. As a result of the big move, we inherited a lot of stuff, either for storage for the 4-5 years they’ll be overseas or to donate/sell.

One of the major items was her car. I decided that, since it was nearly a decade newer than the one I drive, I’d take it on and get rid of my 11-year-old Scion tC, which had less than 44,000 miles on it. I wasn’t looking forward to the process of selling it, though. Can be a hassle. If we took it to CarMax, I figured we wouldn’t get nearly what we could through a private sale, but I wasn’t relishing the though of having to deal with all that folderol. My daughter had sold a bunch of stuff through a community website, which I figured had less of a crazy quotient than Craigslist, so I decided to give it a shot. I took a few pictures of the car in the driveway and posted a 250-word classified on the website. Within a few hours I had no less than seven or eight inquiries about it. Apparently there’s a lot of interest in low-mileage cars, no matter the age. Made me think I should have asked for more!

Anyhow, I showed it to one family for their teenage son after work. They liked it but were going to look at another car. Then I heard from someone who really wanted it. They had cash in hand and wanted it right now! So I had them come over to look at it. I couldn’t believe it—just as I was about to start it up to demonstrate something, the battery chose that moment to kick the bucket. Fortunately, they were highly motivated buyers and we were able to swap out the battery and seal the deal. So, in just under 12 hours, I managed to sell my car. End of ordeal. They should all be so easy. (Well, it could have been easier if not for the stupid battery.) But my days as a huckster are over, I hope. I’m no salesman.

Now we just have to unload all the extra stuff stacked up in the garage and our house will be more or less back to normal.

I’ve been watching Narcos on Netflix during my morning exercise sessions. It’s a fictionalized account of a couple of DEA agents in Colombia during the time when Pablo Escobar rose to prominence. Interesting stuff. They dub in a lot of period news footage (Nancy Reagan and the “just say no” campaign, shots of the real people being portrayed). It’s quite good.

Then we started tearing through the fourth season of Longmire on the weekend. The move to Netflix means that the episodes jump from 42 minutes to pretty much an hour each, without the need to stage mini-crises around commercial breaks, and the show benefits from this. The third episode is especially harrowing. The camera angles are experimental at times, and the production values are quite good, giving the show a richer look. For some reason, though, I seem to have gotten a pretty good knack for identifying when a character is telling a big fat lie, even though the cops on the show don’t glom onto the fact until later. Still a decent show, worth a binge.

I also did a binge rewatch of Season 5A of Haven so I can prepare a recap essay for News from the Dead Zone and to refresh my memory of the show for the launch of 5B in a few weeks. I’m supposed to get a screener of the first two episodes this week, too, so I can help promote the final season. I’m glad to see that Kris Lemche will be back in his role as the Darkside Seeker. He was on the set when we visited last year and I had a lot of fun joking around with him. Unfortunately the nice long interview I did in the morgue that Lemche “crashed” has yet to surface, and I’m beginning to think it never will.

Looks like we’re going to be getting new next door neighbors fairly soon. The SOLD tab has gone up on the realtor’s sign. I can’t say we’ll miss the previous neighbors and their increasing pack of barky dogs. We never really got to know them. The neighbors, not the dogs, I mean. We got to know the dogs very well.

At least they didn’t bring as much baggage with them as the family that moves into the new house in the excellent thriller The Gift, which we saw yesterday morning. The husband and wife move from Chicago to L.A. for his job. She had to leave her job behind, though she’s doing some stuff online. There are hints of possible instability in her past. It’s a new start, perhaps time to add to their family, though that has been problematic in the past. Then he (Jason Bateman) runs into someone from high school while they’re out shopping. Dude is a little creepy. A little stalkerish. The guy is played by Joel Edgerton, who also wrote and directed the film. Bateman’s Simon (as in Simon Says) remembers him as Gordo, though in private he recalls him as Weirdo. He seems a little off kilter, and he keeps showing up, often bearing gifts. Is he obsessed with Simon’s wife, Robyn? Did he do something to the family dog, Jangles? And what really happened back in high school?

There are a few jump-scares, but mostly this is a taut thriller with a very well developed story and characters. Edgerton’s script leads you in all manner of directions and raises any number of suspicions, some of them legitimate, some of them red herrings. He also manages to shift the viewer’s allegiances throughout, until he punches everyone in the stomach with a wholly substantiated but unforeseen revelation. My wife, who generally doesn’t like scary movies, really enjoyed The Gift, because it was all about the characters. No guts or gore. Highly recommended.

We also watched a documentary called Iris, about Iris Apfel, though I’m hard pressed to explain what it is she’s famous for. She became renowned for her rather quirky fashion taste, I guess is the easiest way to say it. She likes gaudy bangles and intriguing textiles and somehow parlayed that into celebrity. She’s in her early 90s and still does all these interviews and talk shows about fashion. Her husband, who turns 100 at the end of the movie, just died this month, I see. It was an oddball film—were she less famous, she could have been featured on an episode of Hoarders, or perhaps even an entire season—but a look at something with which we have no direct exposure, so that’s always interesting.

Hannibal went out with a bang and a few stabs and lots of blood. It was a very strange, entrancing series. In this incarnation, it’s almost a love story between Hannibal and Will Graham, and the final moments were very Reichenbach Falls, although if you didn’t wait for it there was a post-credits scene not to be missed in which Gillian Anderson looked quite ravishing and delectable. Even if there is never a Season 4, which looks like less of a possibility with each passing day, it was a good way to end things.