Month: May 2023

The Hunger and Other Stories

Book #8 for the year and the sixth and last for “Horror May-hem”. Charles Beaumont is a somewhat tragic figure in his field, having produced a string of well-received stories and books and an array of film and TV scripts including several episodes of The Twilight Zone… and then he was dead at 38 from an illness that’s still not really understood, like a form of early onset Alzheimer’s but one that also aged him terribly; apparently by the time he died he looked like he was in his 90s. This was his first book, published in 1957, a mix of hitherto unpublished stories and several that had seen magazine publication. By and large I think it’s this latter group that are the best things in the book, which I have to confess to being quite disappointed by; I was expecting a lot more, you know, horror from something that’s considered something of a horror classic (Stephen King lists it in Danse Macabre, his survey of the genre from 1950-80, as one of his “particularly important” titles*) and originally advertised itself this way:

Personally I actually found most of it fairly mild; obviously I don’t expect a Romero-scale gorefest from a 1950s book, but I’d have thought it might be stronger than it is. I am willing to concede that most of what’s here is not actually bad or anything, and that I may have another Wicker Man situation on my hands… I really didn’t like that film when I first saw but was much more receptive on later viewings, cos I’d gone in at first expecting a “normal” horror film whereas later I went in knowing not to do that and now I think it’s great. Maybe I’ll like The Hunger etc more on a re-read when I know what to expect from it, but on this first encounter I was a lot less blown away than I wanted to be.

*But he also lists Thomas Pynchon’s V. as one of his “particularly important” titles; I’ve never read it but I did once attempt Gravity’s Rainbow which, in conjunction with the plot summary I’ve seen of V., makes me suspect that’s a horror of a different sort…

Who’ll buy my eyes?

This week’s edition of God Awful Movies is another Ray Comfort video, of which they have done several in the past…

I think Ray’s memory of his own books is what’s lacking here…

Ray Comfort is a despicable piece of shit from New Zealand, a Young Earth Creationist, evolution denier, idiot, liar, and serial harrasser of people in public. America, where he has been based since the late 80s, is more than welcome to him. I haven’t actually watched any of his videos myself because life is too short I don’t get paid to watch them, which the GAM crew do (I know, I pay for them myself), so I go by their coverage, and what I’ve gathered from them over the years is that going up to people and trying to debate them in public is the chief content of his videos, whatever the nominal theme of any given video may be.

Ray’s standard tactic is the “are you a good person” question, which is the pretty much inevitable part of the video where he asks whoever he’s pinned down if they think they’re a good person, and then batters them with a bunch of biblical “proof” that they’re not. But in this video he apparently has another question for one of his victims that I actually found properly thought-provoking: “would you sell one of your eyes for a million dollars?”. This is a… berserk thing to ask a person, clearly, but it made me wonder. What answer would *I* give in that situation? If I were unfortunate enough to encounter Ray and he asked me that, what would I say?

Continue reading “Who’ll buy my eyes?”

Cruise of Shadows

Book #7 for 2023, continuing “Horror May-hem” with a book that leans more to the modern weird fiction side than the “regular” horror of its day (the stories within all appeared between 1929 and 1931, with the book coming out in 1932), Cruise of Shadows by Jean Ray… or should that be “John Flanders”? Cos that was the name attached to the book on its first appearance, and to the first translations of the stories that appeared in Weird Tales, and it was as much of a pseudonym as “Jean Ray” was… for whatever reason, that seems to be the name by which Raymundus Joannes de Kepler is best known in the Anglophone world, to the extent that he is; for a long time all you could get (if even that) was his novel Malpertuis and a small collection published in the mid-60s. Scott Nicolay and Wakefield Press have happily taken it upon themselves to try and rectify that AND IT WOULD HELP IF THE LATTER MADE THEIR EBOOKS AVAILABLE OUTSIDE THE US SO I COULD ACTUALLY BUY THEM, I MEAN I CAN’T IMAGINE COPYRIGHT BEING AN ISSUE ANY MORE WITH THE LIKES OF LEON BLOY OR MARCEL SCHWOB FOR FUCK’S SAKE um… sorry about that.

Anyway, the book is subtitled “Haunted Stories of Land and Sea”, and its contents stick to that rather less egregiously than those of Whiskey Tales (Ray’s first collection); happily they also lack the somewhat yikes-inducing anti-Semitism of the earlier book too. Land and sea prove, however, to be somewhat complicated issues in some of these tales, most notably the last two, “The Gloomy Alley” and “The Mainz Psalter”. This is a book I suspect may benefit from a re-reading, cos I am, frankly, uncertain of the import of some aspects of it (I found something especially nebulous about “The End of the Street”); whether or not it constitutes Ray’s masterwork as Nicolay’s afterword argues it does is something I’m not yet sure of cos I haven’t read the other available books THAT I HAD TO GET *cough* DUBIOUSLY OBTAINED COPIES OF GODDAMN IT WAKEFIELD PRESS er… yeah. I like this but I don’t know that I love it, and I do think I need to read more Ray to form a judgement.

Bonnacon!

For the life of me I don’t know how I’ve never heard of the bonnacon before, although it goes back to at least Pliny the Elder who got it from Aristotle. Thanks to John Coulthart, who linked to this Public Domain Review page, thereby finally introducing to my new favourite animal:

When it comes to self-defense, skunks and spitting cobras have nothing on the bonnacon. If threatened, it fled. While fleeing, it defecated. Violently. According to Pliny the Elder, the excrement voided the animal’s body with such explosive force that it could hit targets more than a football pitch away. Contact with its dung was said to burn like a kind of fire, scorching hunting dogs and anyone not equipped with protective gear. (There is some uncertainty whether the weapon was liquid or gaseous, super-heated or acidic.)

Oh, I wish this thing wasn’t mythical. And I couldn’t not use this illustration; the beast looks vaguely regretful at having to do this but equally it refuses not to, while the poor bastard being shat at just has this expression like “fuck, that’s revolting, I’m heading back to the crusade where even the Saracens don’t do this”…

Clearing the path to revelation

One nice thing to come out of that Federalist silliness is that, in checking out the responses to it, I discovered this:

“This” being a mini-album called Imposter by a one-man electronic & post-punk band called Libel. I was going through the responses to that silly Federalist article, was hugely amused to see one posting this legendary Onion article, and followed through to see what else they had on Twitter… oh, they’re a band. Post-punk indeed. Have they got recordings, oh, they do, there’s a Bandcamp link… let’s see what this is like… oooh, this is GOOD. VERY much so, indeed. Bought it as soon as I’d finished listening to it and will certainly be sampling Gavin’s other work; if I ever get to DJ a goth night again, “Death Cult” is going to be in my set.

Thou shalt be fabulous, kween

Although the glitter is awfully hard to wash off afterwards. I mean, I presume it is. Er… anyway, The Federalist is a magazine started by Ben Domenech, noted liar, plagiarist and paid shill for the Malaysian government, and it previously attracted quite some controversy for an op-ed piece defending Roy Moore over, frankly, having tried to date teenagers (some under the age of consent) when he was in his 30s, and also for spreading bullshit about things like Covid-19, climate change and the 2020 elections. Being bigoted shits in the name of “freedom” comes as no real surprise, therefore, and I am pleased to see that almost all the responses I can find to this dickhead have been thoroughly negative. Indeed, someone posted possibly the best reaction image I’ve ever seen…

…and I am now positively itching for more opportunities to use it.

And RIP 11-13 Randle Street

Big fire in Surry Hills this afternoon:

(all pictures via)

So that was the heritage-listed 11-13 Randle St, Surry Hills, which caught fire somehow around four this afternoon. As of now the fire is apparently contained but that whole area is still pretty dicey; fire did spread to one or two other buildings but they seem to have evaded real trouble.

Funnily enough, 11-13 Randle St was the subject of this development plan a few years ago:

Demolition of the existing buildings at 7-9 and 15 Randle Street, retention and re-use of 11-13 Randle Street and construction of a 9 storey building with 2 levels of basement across the sites including through site link between Randle Lane and Randle Street. Use of the building as hotel accommodation (123 rooms) with 2 restaurants, small bar and café

Now, I said that 11-13 was heritage listed, which I presume is why the developers talked about demolishing the buildings on either side but “retention and re-use” for 11-13 cos they evidently couldn’t get past the heritage thing. Which is evidently not so much of a problem for them now, isn’t it. Needless to say I have NO DOUBT WHATSOEVER that this development plan and this fire are all ENTIRELY UNRELATED TO EACH OTHER and there was ABSOLUTELY NOTHING UNTOWARD OR SUSPICIOUS about this fire breaking out in a building destined for redevelopment but with a government-placed stumbling block in the way of that happening, and if there WAS anything untoward like CRIMINAL ACTIVITY involved it had TOTALLY ZERO CONNECTION with that redevelopment and was COMPLETELY RANDOM and WHOLLY COINCIDENTAL… I have equally little doubt that Robinson Urban Planning are distraught in any way about the event, of course. After all, their job is somewhat easier now…

RIP Aunty Entity

Jesus fuck. It’s been a few days for people dying, hasn’t it? Now we can add Tina Turner to the list… we actually nearly lost her in 2016 due to kidney problems when her husband donated one of his own and basically bought her seven more years on Earth. Good man, Erwin. Ike would never have done that for her. And obviously her finally breaking away from Ike in the mid-70s was the best thing she could’ve done; I actually never realised until today that he owned her name. He not only renamed young Anna Mae (or was it Martha Nell?) Bullock, he trademarked the name Tina Turner so that if she tried to leave him he could just replace her and she wouldn’t be able to work under that name again. Just like KISS copyrighting the old makeup for Ace Frehley and Peter Criss so Paul & Gene can use it on whatever ringers they get to replace those two. She made a point of demanding the name in the divorce, and won it despite Ike’s efforts.

I had no idea in the 80s, cos I was still too young, to realise just what it meant for her to become big in the 80s; I don’t know if I was even aware that she’d had a career before that, or maybe I was dimly aware that Ike had been a thing but it was only a dim awareness if that… certainly I didn’t appreciate that this was her rebounding from years of abuse and lack of solo commercial success on her own by the end of the 70s, having a mega hit of an album released by a record label that hadn’t even wanted her… and that she was in her mid-40s by the time she was doing this. She’d undeniably earned it by then. Here she is in 2009, still having it at nearly 70: