Aug 15-16 | HorrorFind | Adelphi, MD

Join us at Horrorfind for the FIVE YEAR ANNIVERSARY PARTY for Raw Dog Screaming Press! (See my tribute to the press if you don’t know who they are). Arnzen will be reading with other RDSP authors throughout the day on Friday evening, 8/15, in Room 2112 at the UMUC Marriott, from 6pm - 10pm. Here’s the schedule:

6:00-6:30 Ronald Damien Malfi
6:30-7:00 Adam Golaski
7:00-7:30 Donna Lynch
7:30-8:00 D. Harlan Wilson
half hour buffer/break
8:30-9:00 Matthew Warner
9:00-9:30 John Edward Lawson
9:30-10:00 Michael A. Arnzen

On Saturday morning, Aug 16th, the film Exquisite Corpse will be part of the Indie Film screenings, launching at 10am in the convention’s Amphitheater! Other films slotted for this morning session include a claymation version of Poe’s The Pit & The Pendulum and an adaptation of F. Paul Wilson’s Foet.

Saturday evening at 8pm, Raw Dog Screaming will be hosting a huge room party open to all comers.

This convention always has a superb dealer’s room brimming with more weird paraphrenalia than you can imagine, a non-stop carnival of film and fun, and a costume event that rivals any Hollywood film set. Other guests in attendance at this huge annual con for fans of horror film and fiction include writers like Jack Ketchum, F. Paul Wilson, Edward Lee, Thomas Monteleone, John Maclay, Kim Paffenroth, Michael Boatman, and too many more to mention, alongside media celebrities like Roddy Piper, William Forsythe, Bill Moseley, Sid Haig, Chainsaw Sally, and so many more.
Visit HorrorFind for more information.

FUTURE APPEARANCES:

Sept 26th, 3-5pm | “The Business & Life of Writing Horror” Panel | 010 Page Hall, Ohio State University | Columbus, OH

Join Lawrence C. Connolly, Lucy A. Snyder, Gary A. Braunbeck and myself for a panel discussion at Ohio State University on “The Business and Life of Writing Horror.” The panel — hosted by the OSU Center for the Teaching of Writing — will be followed by booksigning. A podcastwill likely be available online.

Sept 26-28 | Context-21 | Columbus, OH

I’ll be running a workshop on flash fiction writing (sorry, seats are sold out), reading and sitting on a few panels at this excellent literary convention in Ohio. I was Horror Guest of Honor last year at Context and loved every minute of it. Other horror fiction notables in attendance this year include Guest of Honor Brian Keene, Gary Braunbeck, Mike Laimo, Tim Waggoner, Paula Guran, Maurice Broaddus, Fran Friel, and Lucy Snyder. Apex publishing and Shroud Magazine will also be around, and I anticipate huge parties. Keep your eyes on the Context home page for specific details.

Oct 25-26th | Zombiefest 2008 | Monroeville Mall, Pittsburgh, PA

It returns! And like the living dead, I, too, will be crawling back to the mall. Zombiefest is a two-day zombie-themed convention held at the Monroeville Mall, site of the Romero zombie classic Dawn of the Dead, featuring vendor exhibits, film screenings, author discussion panels, live bands, games and other fun activities for zombie fans like games, concerts and a masquerade ball. And in 2008, it’s FREE admission! Details are still developing, but save the date, which will coincide with World Zombie Day!

Nov 8, 2-5pm | PARSEC Meeting | Pittsburgh, PA
“Horror Today”: Lawrence C. Connolly (author of Veins) and I discuss the state of the genre today with PARSEC: the Pittsburgh Area Science Fiction Enthusiast Club. Location TBA.

Cover for The Book of Lists: Horror

“The Book of Lists: Horror” (edited by Amy Wallace, Del Howison, and Scott Bradley) is coming soon! The cover above just went up on amazon.com and it should be an awesome collection of information, featuring lists by Stephen King, Ray Bradbury, Robert Bloch, Eli Roth, and many other genre greats. My list of the “Best Horror Colleges” will be there. I think this volume is not only going to be a great research tool, but an awful lot of fun. You can preorder the book on Amazon.com now!

Whoa Nelly… Dark Regions is offering 40% off when you buy a four book lot (just $39.95 + postage) from Horror Mall.  You’ll get my Bram Stoker Award winning collection, Proverbs for Monsters, plus the Stoker winner for poetry, Vectors by Charlee Jacob and Marge Simon, Laura Underwood’s Song of Silver, and the AWESOME horror collection by Mark Rainey, Other Gods.  That’s like getting four trade paperbacks from Dark Regions Press for the price of one hardcover…a schweet deal!  Nab it.

Gail Z. Martin, author of the Chronicles of the Necromancer series, recently interviewed me for her ongoing series of podcasts with dark fantasy, paranormal and science fiction writers. Our chatty conversation about gore, humor, death and the attraction of horror stories is now available in a podcast on Gail’s site, which presently features an all-star roster of writers, including Jeffery Thomas, Tony Ruggiero, Justin Gustainis, Alethea Kontis, and Mark Chadbourn. Gail’s latest book is The Blood King, available now from amazon.com, and her new book, Dark Haven is due soon from Solaris Books.

Topics we discuss in our interview:

• fantasy vs. realism
• teaching horror in the post-Virginia Tech world
• literary vs. cinematic horror
• death and the draw of horror in a sanitized world
• the cautionary tale — then and now
• optimism, humor, laughter and impalement in horror fiction

Zombie Mall is now selling the Audiovile CD on its all-things-undead store! They’ve got a few sample tracks posted, too, that you might enjoy…

Technically, two of the tracks on Audiovile are stories purely concerned with Zombies proper. The rest only feature a zombie percussion player who you can dimly hear in the background, tinkling the triangle and groaning for brains when my cats were out of reach from his chain.

The mall loved the CD so much they wrote a happy review of it, too. Learn all about Audiovile in the gorelets bibliography.

The latest issue of The Goreletter featured a contest with prizes for the captions rated as favorites to the following wild image by Proverbs for Monsters artist, Matt Schuster:

About forty people entered some fantastic and hilarious captions and you can read all of them under the original post for chuckles. Thanks to everyone for participating; I enjoyed all the entries. Matt and I settled on the following three for prizes:

“The Not-So-Fantastic Fifth” by Kurt Newton (prize: The B*tchfight ARC + Heaven’s Devils)

“‘Are you leaving me because I’m balding, Susan?’” by Steven Pirie (prize: Signed Licker + AoD v Reanimator)

“Sadly, Mark was asked not to participate in the Hands Across America event. President Reagan wept.” by Josh Byrnes (Artist’s prize: Schuster’s original sketch)

Congrats guys, and thanks to all who entered. More contests will be run in future issues of The Goreletter, so subscribe to the e-mail edition if you don’t want to miss another chance to win.

Finally, I want to publicly thank Matt Schuster for his generosity with this contest. He is a wonderful artist to work with, and he did such a great job with Proverbs for Monsters. I encourage everyone to check out more of Matt’s wild and wonderfully bizarro artwork at mpsindustries.com

July 19th, 7pm | Alpha Booksigning | Barnes and Noble Bookstore | Greensburg, PA

Arnzen reading and book signing, along with sci-fi writer Timothy Zahn (known for his Star Wars books) at Barnes and Noble Bookstore in Greensburg, PA. Students participating in the Alpha SF/F Workshops will be a part of this event (I’m teaching in the program this year). Free and open to the public.

UPCOMING APPEARANCES:

Aug 15-16 | HorrorFind | Adelphi, MD

Join us at Horrorfind for the FIVE YEAR ANNIVERSARY PARTY for Raw Dog Screaming Press! I’ll be there, in addition to reading at this HUGE annual convention of horror film and fiction fans in the Baltimore region. Party details will follow; watch the Raw Dog Screaming page for updates.

Sept 26-28 | Context-21 | Columbus, OH

I’ll be running a workshop on flash fiction writing and more at this excellent literary convention in Ohio. I was Horror Guest of Honor last year at Context and loved every minute of it. Other horror fiction notables in attendance this coming year include Guest of Honor Brian Keene, Gary Braunbeck, Mike Laimo, Tim Waggoner, Paula Guran, Maurice Broaddus, Fran Friel, and Lucy Snyder.

Oct 25-26th | Zombiefest 2008 | Monroeville Mall Expo Mart, Pittsburgh, PA

It returns! And like the living dead, I, too, will be crawling back to the mall. It’s still too early to know details, but save the date, which will coincide with World Zombie Day!

I’m building a new weblog here on gorelets.com called THE POPULAR UNCANNY. It’s a supplement of sorts for my upcoming non-fiction title from publisher Guide Dog Books by the same name.

The book is a critical study of theories of the Uncanny/”das Unheimliche” as they appear in advertising, film, bestsellers, and online. Chapters include examinations of such topics as the icon of the dismembered hand in the history of horror cinema, and a treatment of the advertising world’s “Doublemint Twins” as uncanny doppelgangers. (The Popular Uncanny, btw, was originally my doctoral dissertation at the University of Oregon.)

While the entries in the new blog will tend to lean toward the “academic” side and may refer to theories not all readers will be familiar with, my hope is that the blog will keep my research fresh and fun while also giving me a place to muse about the weirdness in pop culture — in addition to raising awareness about theories of the Uncanny. I think the blog will also help me merge my academic and creative personae in new ways. The site design and structure is still under construction, but posts have already been released on such things as the “gaze” in The Ring and the uncanny in a new ’singing robot’ art exhibit by Talking Heads frontman, David Byrne. Comments and recommendations are always welcome.

The Goreletter, of course, will continue. I’ll post news here about the book when its publication is imminent in Spring 2009. For now, I invite you to come on by the new weblog, anytime.

“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)