I’m the guy right after Jack Ketchum, looks like. Click here to go there.…
In Kyle Reese’s bleak future there’s those Heinlein kind of bugs from space but no Ender to xenocide them away, and, I mean, they walk around in Robocop get-up already and look like Super 8 without it and act like first cousins to the aliens in Titan A.E., chasing a ragtag, Walking Dead band of survivors through an Octavia Butler trek of a story, where the family unit is, like Stitch says, little and broken, but still good. All of which is to say I dig it. More, please.
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Why I use my middle name? Aside from how classy it makes me sound? And aside from the fact that everywhere I go, there’s already six or ten Stephen Joneses at the hotel or in the directory or on the waiting list for a table? It’s mostly this guy, the first/real Stephen Jones, who, as bad luck would have it, was already somebody in the horror field by the time I started out:
I get a lot of his mail, yeah, and finally ran into him at WHC14, in Portland:
Also, I’m not this …
Oh, Doghouse, where have you been my whole life? I’m not saying I haven’t been into the other zombie comedies, the Shaun of the Deads, the Dead & Breakfasts, all the way back to Hysterical! and the splatter comedy Romero was kickstarting in Dawn of the Dead, and all the way up to Ahh!! Zombies! But Doghouse, it’s got the male-bonding (in stupidity) thing going on that Hot-Tub Time Machine had, that The Hangover was kind of predicated on, but it’s got the serious kind of gore we k…
Let the Right One In was a vampire novel we hadn’t seen before, almost like it was trying to be an antidote to things going on in the genre. Not so much a return to form, but a reboot. And then Handling the Undead gave us a completely different kind of zombie, one which is maybe better at expressing our current set of anxieties than the flesh-eating shufflers we’re used to. So of course I came to Harbour expecting more of the same from John Ajvide Lindqvist—which is to say my expectatio…
I mean — I don’t know. But look:
- Tin Man was 2007, Fringe debuted 2008
- each features someone who grew up in a parallel world (Peter, DG)
- each features someone who has had ‘knowledge’ surgically removed from their brain (Walter, Glitch)
- each has a ‘mystic man’ (each played by someone with starpower, too: Nimoy, Dreyfuss)
- each has automatons (DG’s ‘parents,’ Walternate’s shapeshifters)
- each has a doomsda
Just a rough list of the e-book issues I can think of. And, I should say up top here that I’m pretty much addicted to my Kindle. So this isn’t an attack on e-books (which — a lot of of those are taking the form of nostalgia, right? like when we went from cassettes to CDs?). At the same time, I see nothing wrong with the already-proven technology of the paper book; I’m fairly addicted to them as well. And, yes, a lot of times this pro/con argument, it’s eviling …
Sex & Nudity
A woman is seen naked, from behind, but it’s through two doors, and in the point-of-view of a killer tire, so it’s not really anything you can do much with.
Profanity
Not excessive, and what’s there’s mostly from the ‘spectators’—the embedded horror-movie audience meant to offer the same objections we would, or already are, thereby anticipating and perhaps deflating those objections (think the pirate contingent in the theater watching Spongebob, or the W…
is the NYT bestselling author of 30 or so books, +350 stories, some comic books, and all this stuff here. He lives in Boulder, Colorado, and has a few broken-down old trucks, one PhD, and way too many boots. More