Pale Rider: Zombies versus Dinosaurs

I have made good progress working through the editor’s notes on my novel, The Astronomer’s Crypt. My progress would be better, except that I’ve also received edits for another novel—my steampunk adventure set in Japan called The Brazen Shark. In addition to editing two novels, life goes on, and I still have my work at Kitt Peak National Observatory, which means once a week I have either a long drive to the observatory or the long drive home. Because of the long drive, I was pleased to win a copy of the audio book Pale Rider: Zombies versus Dinosaurs by James Livingood in a contest sponsored by Dab of Darkness.

This novella only took about an hour to listen to and I found its approach to both zombies and dinosaurs to be interesting. The zombies in this novel are humans infected by a contagion that causes their brains to mutate, turning them into sociopaths with an insatiable taste for flesh—especially human flesh. Like most zombie stories, what makes these zombies frightening is their ability to overwhelm their victims with sheer numbers. Any large, mindless group can become frightening when the numbers grow large enough.

One seemingly unlikely example from Kitt Peak are lady bugs. The lady bug has a well earned reputation as a fairly benign beetle. If one crawls on your hand, you simply blow on it and they fly away. The lady bugs of Kitt Peak are tenacious creatures. They do not fly away when you blow on them. They just dig in their feet. What’s more, they swarm in quantity. I’ve seen them mounded up against walls, making a black spot several feet wide. I was in one of the telescope domes when a swarm of lady bugs came by so thick, it sounded like a hail storm. What’s more, lady bugs in quantity have a very odd, almost electric smell. I didn’t use lady bugs in The Astronomer’s Crypt, but I might use them in a later chapter in the Wilderness of the Dead series!

The dinosaurs in Pale Rider were genetically engineered from birds, which seems plausible, especially since birds evolved from dinosaurs. It also seems rather frightening because birds can be very aggressive. It’s not hard to imagine a Tyrannosaurus Rex as a giant predatory chicken that doesn’t much care what it eats. What’s more, just because a dinosaur is an herbivore, it doesn’t make it safe. We’re very small creatures compared to some dinosaur species.

One of the creatures in The Astronomer’s Crypt is a monster from Apache legend called “He Who Kills With His Eyes.” This monster is also called “Big Owl.” My editor originally didn’t want me to use the name “Big Owl” because she thought owls were too cute, but my thought was that modern owls are just an evolved dinosaur. So perhaps the Apache monster from the beginning of time is actually a creature that’s a bit more dinosaur than owl.

Getting back to Pale Rider, the story imagines a world that has fallen into decay because of the zombie virus. Nevertheless, humans have endured, partly because they brought dinosaurs back to help them. The story follows Pale Rider, a man who works to clear potential farm land of zombies, so it can be worked by farmers and their dinosaurs. Pale Rider gets a hold of a particular promising plot of land for a good deal. The reason for the good deal is that it’s infested with zombies. Pale Rider recruits help and from there the novella pretty much gives you what you expect from a story with “Zombies versus Dinosaurs” in the title. Our human characters are threatened by both. One particularly inventive part of the story is when the zombies seem to act in concert and find a way to control the dinosaurs, giving us double the fright factor. I found the story fun and worth a listen.

I’ll just wrap up by mentioning that if you do like zombie stories, you can find stories by me, along with a lot of other great writers, in the anthologies Zombiefied: An Anthology of All Things Zombie and Zombiefied: Hazardous Material. In the former anthology, I tell a story about people becoming reliant on zombies and the consequences that result. In the latter anthology, I show the menace that comes from zombies that swarm, but the real horror is in the mind that controls them!

Science and Horror

Science and horror have long gone together. Often, it’s in the sense of a cautionary tale, such as Frankenstein, where humans are advised to take care what natural forces they tamper with. Occasionally, a scientist is brought in to actually solve a problem, such as Professor Van Helsing in Dracula.

Writers are advised to write what they know, so as a scientist, when I wrote Vampires of the Scarlet Order, I wrote a tale of scientists who became vampires. I also had some commentary about scientists tampering with things they don’t understand in a deliberate homage to Frankenstein. The important and fun part was that having scientists become vampires allowed them to explore what becoming a vampire actually meant. In one chapter, physicist Jane Heckman writes her observations of what its like to gain vampiric powers and attempt to understand what they’re for.

In my forthcoming novel, The Astronomer’s Crypt, I also pit scientists against dark forces. In this case, I don’t really give them time to try to understand what the dark forces are. However, I do work to uncover scientists’ underlying humanity that so often gets left out of a lot of fiction and movies. We often see scientists portrayed as cold, or maybe thoughtful, but we sometimes forget they are humans who experience joy, fear, and sadness as well.

One of the reasons “write what you know” is so important is that it allows us to share those experiences which are unique to us. On recent panels and interviews, I’ve been touting the importance of writers having day jobs they love. Besides allowing a writer to assure they have an income better than minimum wage, it allows a writer to chronicle a wider view of the world.

If you’d like to meet my scientist vampires, you can find Vampires of the Scarlet Order at Amazon, Barnes and Noble, or All Romance Ebooks.

Kwaidan

Before I get into the body of today’s post, I have some news to share. I just signed the contract for my novel The Astronomer’s Crypt. Admittedly, if you follow both of my blogs, you’ll already have seen this, but it’s pretty exciting and it means edits should start soon.

A few weeks ago, my friend author Emily Devenport, recommended a 1964 movie of Japanese ghost stories to me called Kwaidan. I finally had a chance to watch the movie this past week and I have to say, this is both a fascinating look at Japanese folktales and a look at what makes good horror.

Kwaidan is an anthology film, composed of four tales. “The Black Hair” tells the story of a poor samurai who leaves his wife to marry another for a better position. His first wife literally haunts the samurai until he feels compelled to return home. In “The Woman of the Snow” two woodcutters are stranded in a blizzard and take shelter. A vampire-like woman appears and kills one of the men, then tells the other she’s sparing him as long as he tells no one about her. “Hoichi the Earless” was the longest entry in the film and tells about a blind minstrel who is compelled to play for a long-dead emperor and his court. Finally, “In a Cup of Tea” tells the story of both a samurai and a writer who see mysterious faces in their drinks.

The film is adapted from several folktales collected by Lafcadio Hearn. The stories appear in Kwaidan: Stories and Studies of Strange Things for which the film is named, Shadowings, and Kotto: Being Japanese Curios With Sundry Cobwebs. I was especially interested to learn of Hearn’s tales, as he was one of my sources of nineteenth century Japanese culture while writing my other recently finished novel, The Brazen Shark.

Clocking in at two hours and forty-four minutes, the movie is arguably a little slow-moving for the modern horror film, but it takes that time to build wonderful atmosphere. There is amazingly little blood in the film for a horror movie—though the one scene with blood is plenty horrific, even though the worst of the gore is covered up. Like a good Stephen King novel, it builds tension by getting us to care about the characters. Aside from the samurai of the first story, it’s hard to feel the characters deserve the horrible things that happen to them. The stories are metaphors for good advice, such as beware of blizzards and strangers, and perhaps don’t drink the tea if there are faces floating in it.

Do you have a favorite horror folktale? I’d love to hear about it in the comments.

---

Kwaidan Japanes Movie Poster licensed under fair use of copyrighted material in the context of the movie Kwaidan. Via Wikipedia – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Kwaidanposterjapanese.jpg#/media/File:Kwaidanposterjapanese.jpg

Big Owl

My editor contacted me a few days ago to let me know she’ll be ready to start work on my novel The Astronomer’s Crypt soon after the beginning of the year. In the novel I unleash a demonic monster, ghosts, and gangsters on an observatory during a ferocious storm. As it turns out, my demonic monster takes inspiration from one of the monsters who are said to inhabit the Earth at the beginning of time in the Mescalero Apache Creation story. The particular monster I had in mind is sometimes called “Big Owl” or “He Who Kills with his Eyes.” Now, my editor wanted me to downplay the owl the connection, because owls are cute like the fellow to the left. I could see that point and did my best to oblige.

While I’m waiting for that work to start, I’ve been working on my steampunk novel The Brazen Shark. For one of the scenes, I decided to research the owls of Japan and I came across this YouTube video. Just to note, the featured owl is the same species as the one in the photo above.

Even though this Northern White Faced Scops Owl is actually rather small, I couldn’t help but think of the demonic “Big Owl” when I saw this owl take on his “Dracula” pose. Also, just to note that although the footage is from a zoo in Japan, it turns out the owl itself is from Africa, so I wasn’t able to use him in the steampunk novel. Even so, you never know what this might inspire in the editing phase of The Astronomer’s Crypt.

Servant of the Bones

Last week, I read Servant of the Bones by Anne Rice. This is one of those books I picked up several years ago, but has been sitting on my shelf. I finally decided it was time to dive in and, for the most part, I’m glad I did.

At the time Servant of the Bones was released in 1996, Anne Rice had published five novels in her famous Vampire Chronicles and Interview With the Vampire had been made into a film starring Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt. Like Interview With the Vampire, Servant of the Bones involves a supernatural creature telling his story. In this case, the supernatural creature is named Azriel and he was a Jew living in Babylon at the time its conquered by Cyrus the Persian. If Azriel will allow himself to be made a living statue of the god Marduk and confer a blessing upon the conqueror, he promises to free the Jews. Azriel agrees, but things go horribly wrong when a witch named Aseneth attempts to work black magic to turn Azriel into a djin-like spirit attached to his own gold-plated skeleton. We follow Azriel’s journey to present-day New York, where he finds himself witnessing the murder of a cult-leader’s daughter.

Overall, I enjoyed the story. I did find the opening chapters a little difficult to follow, but was glad I stuck with it. I think some of the difficulty had to do with Anne Rice’s storytelling method. She sets up Azriel’s meeting with the man who interviews him, then Azriel tells long stretches of his story in dialogue. It’s not until Part III of the novel that Rice drops the dialogue format and just swaps to Azriel speaking in first person without quotation marks. It strikes me that most of the chapters could simply have been told from Azriel’s point of view with interlude chapters that described his interaction with the interviewer.

I also found some interesting synchronicity between this novel and my current journey into new horror territory. Anne Rice was well known for her vampire books and arguably didn’t need to write anything else. However, she apparently had a story she wanted to tell and didn’t feel this was suitably told from the perspective her well-known vampires or witches. There are similarities with her vampire novels—such as powerful, supernatural creatures having a moral compass—but there are notable differences as well. Because Azriel is somewhat more sympathetic and “human” than Anne Rice’s vampires, I found his journey more frightening. Anne Rice’s vampires cannot be killed easily. Azriel spends his spiritual existence uncertain whether he will wake to face another day.

That’s basically what’s happening with The Astronomer’s Crypt. There’s no reason this story couldn’t take place in the same world as the Scarlet Order vampire novels. The evil forces would certainly fit in both series, but in this case, I want to explore what happens when humans have to deal with those forces themselves. If I’m successful, it will be a wild and terrifying ride!