Stephen Graham Jones

Third installments of a franchise the audience is in love with are very difficult to pull off. Nobody says Alien³ or Return of the Jedi or the third Scream are their favorites of the series, right? Even Godfather III, as good as it might be, is overshadowed by the first two. Granted, by the third installment, the success of the original and its sequel have given this latest incarnation a serious budget to work with, and all the marketing is in place, and some of the principal actors …

It’s a bad/wonderful hole to fall in, but man, I need these, just to set them up with my Mulder & Scully action figures:

then of course I’ll just nab these too, and be in business:

and, man, all the patches I need, I don’t have near enough jeans to take them all. and I’ve got just a lot of jeans.…

“In a great turnaround, upstart Cormac McCarthy’s novel The Road, billed as something of an homage to The Omega Man‘s Charlton Heston, whom McCarthy once did stunt-work for, but owing more probably to Walter Miller, Jr.’s A Canticle for Liebowitz, managed to steal the 2007 Pulitzer for fiction from — “

Okay, sorry. Just figured out that any book I put in there’s either going to be insulting that book or trying to pull down The Roa…

I’m no expert, but this seems pretty cool to me: a reading I did a month or so ago, all cut up into little flash bits, with an interview too. Click the pic below to hit it, or the arrow-thing to listen.

Kurt Vonnegut, Jr: no more. Gone. Maybe like Billy Pilgrim, though, he’s just rollercoasting back and forth through it all now. Laughing. Hope so, anyway.…

Which, I’m finding, aren’t at all the same as my five favorite books. Ridiculous, yes? Wish I had some fix for that, or at least an explanation, or suspicion. I mean, it’s kind of presupposing some major disconnect between intensity and . . . I don’t know: appreciation? Revisitability? Not some Pirsig-ish ‘quality,’ I don’t think. But who knows. Anyway, today, were I picking my five favorite-ever books, they’d look som…

This has to be the oldest news around, but’s new to me anyway: watching “The Women of Candy Snatchers” featurette on the Candy Snatchers DVD, and Tiffany Bowling kind of asides that she was in that old series “The New People,” which she says is Lost, now. So, checked IMDb, and yep:

A group of young people crash land on a deserted island that was a never used atomic bomb test site. With the world thinking that they were all killed, “The New Peo

From what I hear, there’s a Demon Theory review in the brand new Rue Morgue (#66). Anxious to see it myself. And that (my)”Father, Son, Holy Rabbit” story’s in the current Cemetery Dance (#57), with just a supercool illustration.

…

• Old MadTV & Saw fun
• French X-Files
• If I’d had the clicks to make a trailer for Demon Theory, it would have looked like the child of this and this and definitely this. But there’d have been a good deal of this as well, of course.
• And, talking DT, this, cribbed (it took about fifty toggles back and forth) from that Going to Pieces:
  

  “If you try to make a horror film where somebody says ‘I don’t know what that sound was but I’ll go investigate,

or, more particularly, from DEAD SILENCE: going to the Guignol ‘doll’ Theater on Lost Lake in a town called Raven’s Fain when there’s a killer on the loose who eats living tongues is pretty much just asking for trouble. This isn’t to say DEAD SILENCE isn’t pretty surprisingly good either, though. I’m not really one for doll-movies — they all kind of smack of Chucky, and I was tired of him instantly (though, just because I&#…