“What can I say? Holy effeing hell this is some brilliant sh*t! …Audiovile has BITE. It sounds like something you would hear late at night in a darkened coffee shop, with wisps of old coffee wafting to your nose….It has a very unique style, something from a David Lynch film. It’s deep, grabs you by the ears and refuses to let go.”
– from Brian Hardin’s review of Audiovile at the Zombie Mall!

Great review… and Zombie Mall is a great store, too, by the way! Here’s a cool offer they gave us for the latest issue of The Goreletter:

ENTER THE ZOMBIE MALL
You won’t believe the weirdness that the Zombie Mall has in store for you — from “infant zombie creepers” to “hot dog zombie pillows” — they’ve got more than any sleepwalking brain-eater could ever need. And they’re currently running a cool promotion where if you purchase an item from their online store, pose in a photo “playing” with it somehow, and then send the picture back to them, you can get 15% off any item.
Visit http://www.zombiemall.com/ to make your purchase
then send your photos to dead@zombiemall.com

Check them out.

The Goreletter Vol. 5, #3, with the title “Wacky!” was mailed to subscribers on 27/June/2008 @ 10 pm est. It contains extra material not available here on the weblog version, including contests and exclusive discounts on several horrifying goodies!

If you subscribe and did not receive this issue, e-mail me for a replacement or review the archives at gorelets.com.

Subscribe today…it’s painless, fun and free! (Well…probably not completely pain-free). Issues are mailed only four or five times a year, so your inbox won’t be glutted. — Mike Arnzen

The mounted head begins to speak:
you know, I like it better this way,
I feel more like myself,

no body to worry about anymore,
just me alone with my thoughts,
and there’s time to talk to you
without the distractions of

yada yada yada

I know dear and I prefer it, too,
I say, putting on my
boxing gloves.

Now remind me,
where did you store
the tongs?

Late last year, Wonder Entertainment released a special collector’s edition of Thomas Ligotti’s short story “The Frolic” in a book that comes bundled with a DVD — a 24 minute adaptation of that story directed by Jacob Cooney. Get it soon, because this product is limited to 1000 copies, and there are signed editions available. Remarkably, this is the very first cinematic adaptation of Ligotti’s work — and I must say, it’s an excellent treatment, co-scripted by Ligotti himself, intensely directed, and well-acted.

In my Goreletter reviews, I try to shine light on (mostly independent) “print” books because I feel that other media already get plenty of press and attention. At first I didn’t want to review The Frolic here because it is a new film, but the truth is this edition is more of a multimedia “story event” than your usual DVD release. Here you’ll get a full-blown celebration of the short story in a perfect-bound paperback which features not only a “newly revised version” of “The Frolic” (which originally appeared in Ligotti’s first collection, Songs of a Dead Dreamer), but also an eyebrow-raising introduction by the author, the complete screenplay for the adaptation by Ligotti and his screenwriting partner Brandon Trenz, and also enlightening interviews with everyone involved with the production of the film. Indeed, the book is everything that would normally appear on a “special features” section of an ordinary DVD, but here the printed word is so well-respected that it truly celebrates Ligotti’s mastery as a storyteller above all.

In a nutshell, the short story itself is about the chilling effect a child killer named “John Doe” has had on his prison house psychologist, David Munck. The killer, who justifies his actions by claiming he steals children away to some unearthly place so they can “frolic” together, disturbs Munck at the core, chipping away at his “objective” scientific worldview and replacing it with the supernatural. This foments into sheer terror when Doe refers to a “Colleen” during an interview — a name that sounds a lot like his own daughter’s, “Noreen,” a name Doe couldn’t possibly know. Ligotti does a masterful job of fracturing Munck’s world, from his faith in science and his career to his family relations, and much of the horror of the story comes from its inevitable, unstoppable conclusion.

The story artfully juxtaposes the doctor’s job in the adult world against the killer’s “work” in the world of children — and the characters lives intersect in artfully frightening ways. The film version does a great job capturing the creepy tension between the doctor and the killer by focusing on their parallels, without ever directly depicting any violence or gore, and the film changes the storyline just enough to make it stand strongly on its own two feet as a distinctive tale. The film, like the story, is dialogue-heavy, but it puts more focus on John Doe than it does the doctor and his family. However, the acting is so good (especially by John Doe played by Maury Sterling) that the tension between the characters mounts in a way that is highly reminiscent of the scenes in Silence of the Lambs, where Clarice Starling interviews Hannibal Lector: we can feel the prisoner’s great power despite his physical restraint, and we recognize his potential for evil in the glint of his knowing smile.

The bundled book gives excellent insight into Ligotti’s process. In his introduction, the author discusses the history of the story in a way that makes him sound almost embarrassed about its creation in 1982, yet proud of this cinematic treatment of it twenty five years later. He writes about his aversion to using “normal characters” as protagonists, which is the stock approach of contemporary domestic horror. Horror cinema, he argues, is inherently told from the viewpoint of normalcy, under some kind of threat by the abnormal, and this is how it engenders chills in the “normal” audience who are forced by films to confront it — but from a safe distance. In his fiction, Ligotti prefers to distort reality and present an abnormal worldview, tapping into the Weird with a capital W. But, in the 80s, Ligotti wanted to try his hand at one of these “normal” kinds of horror stories, just to see what it would happen if he sifted his proclivity for the aberrant through his abnormal lens. “The Frolic” was the result…and, he implies, the fact that he wrote a moderately “normal” horror story is precisely what makes it more adaptable to cinema than his other work.

In other words, “The Frolic” is Ligotti at his most conventional, if not accessible. It’s a great choice for the first adaptation of his work — but the story is no less disturbing because of it. Ligotti is very much a literary horror writer, if only in that he writes stories that are meant to be read and thought about in a way that cinema — which imagines the visual FOR us — does not allow. His stories are very much psychodramas of the dark fantastic, and since much the “psychodrama” is in the reader’s mind, the gaps and limits of language are imperative to staging it. The film version of The Frolic succeeds because it keeps the camera movement and other direction relatively low key, letting the dialogue of the actors and the written script drive the story. Anyone expecting the rapid editing and riotous gore of films like Hostel will be let down by this story, which is very “talky” — but since most of the story is a conversation between a mystified psychologist and an imprisoned child murderer, its tension and intrigue are high strung.

The film version differs just enough from the fiction version to make the set worth your while. Read the story first. Then watch the movie. Then read the screenplay and watch the special features. While the interview with Ligotti appears in the book, you won’t get any special appearances in the shape of cameos or interviews from the man (who seems to be so reclusive that he might well be the Thomas Pynchon of horror). If you like to see Ligotti’s imagination transformed into a visual medium, you might also be interested in the wonderful comic anthology from Fox Atomic, The Nightmare Factory; the first volume is excellent (and a second volume is coming soon).
***
Order The Frolic ($45) signed collector’s edition

Visit Thomas Ligotti Online

If you’ll indulge me for a moment: please pick up your wine glass, water bottle or coffee mug. I want to raise a high toast to a great publisher.

This year marks Raw Dog Screaming Press’ fifth anniversary. Anyone who knows the independent press, knows that simply surviving that long — especially in today’s publishing economy — is a true milestone of success. I’m proud to be one of their authors, an early runt of their raw puppy litter — and when I think about how far they’ve gone to support my experiments in horror, I am not only humbled, but also proud to be a part of their efforts to push the envelope of the genre, if not literature itself. Not only do they persistently take risks on some very edgy work (”A Child’s Guide to Death” anyone?), but they also go out of their way to promote their titles and support their authors in creative ways.

“What we wanted to do was publish the unpublishable, put out books that other publishers wouldn’t touch because they cross genres, mix conventions or just don’t play by the rules,” co-publisher Jen Barnes writes about their origins, in a retrospection on their livejournal. Now, almost five years later, Raw Dog Screaming has published 18 novels, 14 collections (including 2 books of poetry), 10 anthologies and one CD/audiobook.

I’ve been very lucky to have them as a literary partner over these five years. Two of our books together were Stoker award finalists and the one that remains in print — 100 Jolts — continues to be a very popular book. My second novel, Play Dead, was too experimental for the mainstream press, but Raw Dog grabbed it in its slobbery jaws and ran with it: they not only printed Play Dead in both a fine limited hardcover and an amazingly sculpted “Grim Grimoire” edition, but also created a deck of custom-illustrated playing cards (highly collectable now) to go along with it — AND they hosted a charity poker game party at World Horror Convention to debut the book! The fact that this novel sold out its complete run in hardcover says a lot about the committment that John Lawson and Jen Barnes at RDSP have to their authors.

If you haven’t been reading their books, you should give their catalog a look-see. They relish the experimental — from Harold Jaffe’s “docufictions” to D. Harlan Wilson’s outrageously funny brand of the bizarro. My 100-story collection, 100 Jolts, is another great example of books that other publishers probably would be too afraid to touch. A single-author collection, filled with short-shorts, some no longer than a paragraph? Unheard of. But creative risks like these pay off, because readers are actually hungry for fresh angles and tired of the same old story. Jolts was successful enough to recently be re-released in a hardcover edition with bonus material — and if that wasn’t enough, they went beyond the pale to supplement it with a CD of musically-enhanced readings, in Audiovile! This induldgence of my musical and oratorical performances is quite remarkable, I think, and it says a lot that the Raw Dog is willing to sniff its gory nose around diverse new media territories, hungry for blood. Seriously: how many publishers really cultivate the artistic side of their writers in such unique ways? I can think of…none. Raw Dog isn’t just printing books, they really care about the Arts — just look at their wild covers, or their recent reaches into children’s picture books, and it quickly becomes self-evident: they’re twisted, but they care about creativity.

So John and Jen (and Ripley) at Raw Dog Screaming Press: here’s to you!

To celebrate, RDSP is hosting a 5 year anniversary party at HorrorFind Weekend in the Baltimore area this coming August. I’m going to be there, along with several other members of the Raw Dog pack: presently, D. Harlan Wilson, Adam Golaski, John Edward Lawson, Donna Lynch & Stephen Archer, Ronald Damien Malfi, John Edward Lawson, and Matthew Warner are all scheduled to appear, with readings, parties, and other fun events. To quote the evil dead: “Join ussss!”

TA-DA!
To pop the champagne early, they are offering Goreletter readers an exclusive discount on Audiovile — their first audiobook, by yours truly. You can get a copy directly from Raw Dog Screaming for just $7.95, ppd! That’s $5 off! EXCLUSIVE ORDER LINK HERE.

“Death is caused by swallowing small amounts of saliva over a long period of time.”
– George Carlin (died June 2008)

“Funicular.” It starts with fun, so it can’t be bad, right? Wrong. That would be like sticking your head in a raging furnace, hoping to see a fern. 

Chances are 80-20 that if something is “-icular” it is going to be nasty. You know what I mean:  cancerous prefixes like “test-” or “mast-” — and manslaughtery ones like “vehi-” or “curr-” — all leap immediately to mind.

But to be “funicular,” in particular, is to be ropey and nasty.

The root of the word is “funicle,” which in botany is a term that refers to the stalk of an ovule or seed. In anatomy, it’s any corded tissue, like a bundle of nerves, or that weird stuff that connects back to a placenta. Thus “funiculus” is a synonym for an umbilicus, only less umbly.

In less scientific — but no less geeky — parlance, “funicular” is simply an adjective pertaining to a rope, a cord, or its tension. “Funiculus” is Latin for “slender rope.” Thus we have “funicular railways” that run cable cars. But to me, “funicular” still sounds like a “funny collar,” and I don’t know many of those made of rope, except when you’re hanging a clown.

This looks academicular.
This looks funicular.
And this is just a funny collar.

If shooting a frail little kittie out of a high-powered cannon is your idea of fun, then just wait until you try Dan Fleming’s “Kitten Cannon” game — where the aim is not only to watch the fuzzball fly, but to make that feline soar as far as possible by ricocheting its body off of trampolines, bombs, and TNT stockpiles…but look out for the Venus Fly Traps and metal spike pits!

I’m a cat lover and I can’t seem to stop playing this game long enough to finish my letter to the ASPCA.  Ah well, maybe it isn’t so bad: this tortured tabby has wayyyy more than nine lives.

My best distance to date:  1182 ft.

http://www.burststudio.com/kitten.html

• Write about a WOMAN-eating plant (as opposed to just a man-eater).
• Everyone says they’re afraid of clowns.  What are clowns scared of?  Depict their worst nightmare.
• Ever heard the expression, “Let your freak flag fly”?  Write a story or poem about a freak nation and its hallowed flag.  (Option: try drawing or describing the iconography of the flag before you begin).

***
Review the entire “Instigation” department where you can now post your writing!
http://www.gorelets.com/blog/dept/instigation/

Time for a new contest!

Come up with a witty caption for the image below and you will be eligible to win one of the following “book & comic series” prizes (…there will be two winners chosen!) :

• An almost-impossible-to-find signed “Advanced Review Copy” of The B*tchfight by Arnzen
  + the first four issues of Jai Nitz’ horror comic series, Heaven’s Devils (Image).

• A signed copy of Arnzen’s (now out-of-print and still out-of-its-mind) novella, Licker
  + the first four issues of Army of Darkness vs. Reanimator (Dynamite Comics).

NEW BONUS ADDITION: A THIRD PRIZE!
Matt Schuster will be picking his personal favorite caption for his art, and the winner will receive the original sketch for it! If you haven’t entered yet, the odds just got a lot better, so act now!

HERE ARE THE RULES:

• DEADLINE: JULY 6th, NOON, est. Any captions/comments received after that date will not be eligible to win.
• Anyone can post a caption to enter by leaving a “comment” below.
• One entry per person — so make it count.
• I know it’s hard to abide by this one, but no obscenity. That’ll be my judgment call, but try to keep it PG-13. I won’t approve comments with “curse” words or overt description of sexuality, because kids do visit this site.
• A valid e-mail address MUST be provided on the comment form along with your entry so that you can be contacted if you win a prize. Your privacy will be respected.
• ALL entrants who post entries will be added to the Goreletter e-mail list, if they are not already subscribers. To win you have to be a subscriber when decisions are made. You may unsubscribe after the contest if you want to (but you won’t want to); regardless, your personal info is safe.
• Captions do NOT have to be funny to win, but must pertain to the image given. The winners will be chosen based on Arnzen’s entirely subjective judgment about good captioning.

Thanks to MATT SCHUSTER — the artist from Proverbs for Monsters — for graciously providing this original sketch for this contest. Drop by his website to see more of his fantastic imaginings!

Here it is…caption away!

Get out of here and go read my guest blog entry at the Horror Library Blog-o-Rama, called “Worlds of Horror.” (If you’re on myspace, go here instead, where the conversation is). I issue horror fans a challenge to read more international horror writers and break out of their “literary isolationism” — and I offer some titles to help you get started on a tour of scary world literature.

Here’s a very short excerpt:

Browse your bookshelves and your video racks. What percentage of these titles are all published and produced in the same country in which you live? How many of them are in the same language you speak? How many are created by people who are just like you?

Nothing wrong with that. It doesn’t make you a racist or a bad person. But you may be guilty of “literary isolationism” — and maybe it’s time for you to break out of your protective, predictable shell.

How aware are you about the horror coming out of countries foreign to you? Are you aware how freaking WEIRD that stuff is? How bizarre and scary? Horror is ALL ABOUT the foreign, alien, and altogether OTHER, and I bet that if you haven’t read a lot of “multicultural” horror, you haven’t really seen just how weird and different tales from foreign lands can be.

All the folks at Horror Library — like Fran Friel, RJ Cavender, Boyd Harris — are all passionate and talented. You should buy their books. A new anthology — Horror Library III — is slated for publication soon… just look at this advanced peek at the table of contents for HL3:

“The Station” by Bentley Little
“Guarded” by Michael A. Arnzen (my story is about airport security checkpoints…arrrgh!)
“The Apocalypse Ain’t So Bad” by Jeff Strand
“Under the Bridge Downtown” by Gary A. Braunbeck & Matthew Warner
“After” by Kealan Patrick Burke
“Masks and Shadows” by Cullen Bunn
“Consumed” by Michael Cavillo
“Ashes of the Dead” by Kurt Dinan
“Clover” by Gina Ranalli
“Being Supreme” by Mark Justice
“The Steel Church” by Charles Colyott
“Them” by Sunil Sadanand
“The River Child” by R. Michael Burns
“Obsidian Sea” by Kurt Kirchmeier
“The Rhythm Method” by Mikal Trimm
“When The Skies Toss Down Rains Heavy” by Eric Grizzle
“The Orange Mammoth” by Matt Bain
“Short Stacked” by Rodney J. Smith
“The Review” by Richard Moore
“Extra Innings” by John Peters
“The Birdie” Stephen Couch
“Toll” by Blu Gilliand
“Blink The Blood Away” by R.M. Ridley
“Teeth” by Alison Campbell-Wise

Not only is the cover art very disturbing, but this line-up sounds like quite a library to me (not just because some of my favorite writers are in there… the fact is, I’m already scared by some of those titles — what the hell is an Orange Mammoth, Mr. Bain? Why should I be blinking blood away, M. Ridley? How can the apocalypse not be so bad, Jeff Strand? Carumba, this is going to be a crazy read!)

From the June 2008 Pittsburgh Professional Magazine:

Ghoulish Goals: Seton Hill writing professor keeps collecting awards for his horror fiction by Kathleen Ganster (photos by Jim Judkis).

PRODUCT NAME: Toast Tito’s Corn Chips
ARTWORK: Corn Chip Bag brimming with crisped brown foot ailments.
REASON FOR REJECTION: Too sick, even for us. The pictured dip is…worse.

PRODUCT NAME: Axe Devitalizing Shower Gel
ARTWORK: “Psycho” shower scene with axe-wielding maniac in silhouette behind a curtain.
REASON FOR REJECTION: This is more an idea than a product parody.
Besides, Axe is for men, and the sudsy nude in the shower is cleary female.

PRODUCT NAME: BloodGeyser
ARTWORK: Brown bottle spraying blood from top.
REASON FOR REJECTION: Not bad, but pun is too easy.
It would help if the bottle wasn’t jaggedly broken in half
and embedded into Smokey the Bear’s chest. (Huh? Yellowstone, maybe…?)

PRODUCT NAME: Ball Park Frank
ARTWORK: Puffy male head, carrots, and bones bobbing in cannibal pot…along with hot dogs.
Caption reads “He plumps when you cook him.”
REASON FOR REJECTION: Getting close. But I see no reference to a “Ball Park”…wait…there’s a baseball cap, filled with…scalp? Ugh. We can’t print this.

PRODUCT NAME: Neumann’s Own Dressing
ARTWORK: Soiled gauze. Literally. A used bandage.
REASON FOR REJECTION: This is biomedical waste, not art.

PRODUCT NAME: Killette! The Blood a Man Can Jet!
ARTWORK: Silver razor embedded in a blood-spraying throat.
REASON FOR REJECTION: Close again…but another blood spray?! Lame. Besides, everyone knows that disposable razors aren’t straight razors.

PRODUCT NAME: Drunken Donuts
ARTWORK: Chubby moustachioed maniac pulls a hacksaw through a wino’s leg. The oblivious wino drinks from paper bagged bottle. Caption reads: “Time to make the donuts, Daddy!”
REASON FOR REJECTION: We’ve done this one before (xref the ‘lost 1992 series’)…only in a much more palatable way.

PRODUCT NAME: Wonder Head
ARTWORK: Human head, pre-sliced, wrapped tight in white plastic. “Fortified with 666 essential sinerals.”
REASON FOR REJECTION: What the hell is this? “Sinerals?”
Is that the president’s face behind the plastic?
Why the fake beard?

PRODUCT NAME: Wack-ee Package
ARTWORK: Square chrome object on shiny silver paper — a machete glinting in a mirror?
REASON FOR REJECTION: I don’t get….

***

[ Note: My "Wack-ee" Packages are not to be confused with authentic Topps brand Wacky Packages. Visit their web site for fun online games and samples...and you'll even find a link to buy their awesome new coffeetable art book (comes in waxpaper wrap!)  Also drop by WackyPackages.Org for more parody-loving bubble gum-smelling Wacky Fandom than you could possible handle. ].