Sunday Paper on a Saturday Night (a.k.a. Sunday Supplement 11/10/13)

I meant to recommend this new Universal Horror tribute album from Midnight Syndicate closer to Halloween, but I missed the cobweb-infested window of opportunity. Needless to say, I enjoyed this one a lot, and "It Lives!" is a definite fave (along with "Into the Valley of Shadows" and "Unwanted Visitor"). Of course, I'm a little torn, as I would have loved a CD by these gents featuring reinterpretations of the original Universal scores, but who knows? Maybe they'll get around to that next Halloween.

The Man Behind the Jaggerstein Monster!

Turns out one of the most popular posts last month was Back from the Abyss: The Dell Movie Classic Mummy! The success of that particular Internet excavation project sent me looking for some other Undead Egyptiana I once had in my possession, including this board game. Man, I wish I'd held on to it... though (to be honest) my lead figures weren't nearly so expertly painted.

Last but definitely not least: One of the finest short story writers going, John Langan, has a new collection out. If you like your horror dark and literate but not at all stuffy or staid, grab yourself a copy of The Wide Carnivorous Sky and Other Monstrous Geographies.  I intend to, as I became an instant Langan fan the moment I read "On Skua Island" several years ago. If you need further endorsement, Jeffrey Ford and Laird Barron have anted up with an Introduction and Afterword for John's latest compendium... and that's about as fine a double-shot of endorsement as I can imagine. Order up!

Back from the Abyss: The Dell Movie Classic Mummy!

The first mummy story I ever encountered was in a comic book -- one from a stack my older brother had collected in the fifties and early sixties, which I inherited around the time Larry discovered girls, bought a used Ford Fairlane, and put comics and kid-stuff in the rear-view mirror. I always remembered the story, but the comic disappeared somewhere along the trail. Maybe in the same purge that cost me my early issues of Famous Monsters of Filmland, an episode which (in Partridge family lore) has taken on the epic proportions of the broken leg lamp scene in A Christmas Story.*

Anyway, I looked  high and low for another copy of that comic during my years as a teenage comic collector and dealer, but never found it. When I decided to write "The Mummy's Heart," I figured I'd take another crack at the search, and maybe grab some inspiration for the story in the bargain. After all, back in the day I didn't have Google at my disposal.

Different story today... about three clicks and I had it. Not only the reprint comic which (in much abused non-mint form) I'd once held in my own hands:

But also the original undead Egyptian specific edition, with a knockoff Universal mummy tale that echoed the Karloff/Chaney, Jr. flicks, but definitely went in its own direction, too:

Even better, a couple more clicks and I discovered a blog featuring the whole issue, all spiffed up and looking better than the edition I'd once held in my grubby little monster-lovin' mitts:

The Horrors of It All  Blogspot: Dell Movie Classic The Mummy (Part One)
The Horrors of It All Blogspot: Dell Movie Classic The Mummy (Part Two)

Check out the above if you want the definitive take on a mummy who can 1) sprint like Woody Strode, 2) climb buildings, and 3) get tackled like a guy running a misguided Statue of Liberty play. Seriously. Plus: this living dead Egyptian is possessed of a single eyeball that can (by turns) hypnotize and melt handcuffs. And: the square-jawed hero has an Egyptian Peter Lorre-style sidekick, always a plus. Lastly: I remember acting out the part of the story where the mummy tries to kidnap the heroine; I was the mummy, the preacher's daughter from next door was the girl. Needless to say, parental disapproval soon followed.

Anyway, rereading the Dell mummy tale all these years later wasn't exactly inspiring when it came to creating my own story, but it was fun. A little more clicking around and I discovered that Dell produced a slew of Movie Classic issues featuring the Universal Monsters crew. What I haven't found is a compilation that reprints all this stuff. Now that would be fun... and a great gift for Monsterkids everywhere. I'd definitely pony up the bucks to spend a few hours eyeballing this murderer's row:

Now, if only the good folks at Dell had gotten around to adapting Abbott & Costello Meet Frankenstein... or Werewolf of London... or The Old Dark House... or the Karloff & Lugosi versions of The Raven and The Black Cat!


*And, yep, we're talking issues #1 - 20 of that fabled Warren mag. Mom insisted that my Famous Monsters collection was a fire hazard. She used to tell me: "Just cut out the articles you like -- those things could burn down the whole house!" In other words, the mags were doomed. I was away at summer camp, learning to skin jack rabbits, when they became landfill. Yes. There was no recycling in those days, and summer camp was a different experience than it is today.

The Mummy's Heart

A new novella, "The Mummy's Heart," is out in Paula Guran's Halloween: Magic, Mystery, and the Macabre. This one's camped out on the coffee table for the duration of the holiday season, as Ms. P has collected tales from some personal favorites (new and old): Stephen Graham Jones, the Tems, Jonathan Maberry, Chelsea Quinn Yarbro, John Shirley, and Caitlin R. Kiernan. Not to mention two gents who (quite often) make me want to bust my pencils -- Laird Barron and Brian Hodge. And for bonus points: there's a WWII werewolf tale; first thing I've read by Carrie Vaughn (I'm late to the dance as usual). It was a good one. When it comes to sub-genres, WWII/spookerific mashups are a long-standing weakness of mine.

Anyway, I'll have more about "The Mummy's Heart" (and fictive mummies in general) in my next post, but for now I'll leave you with a taste of the tale itself:

The trail I'm talking about was cut by a mummy.

He did the job on Halloween night in 1963. He was mad as a hatter, and he came out of a pyramid that was (mostly) his own making. And no, he wasn't really a mummy. But that night, he was definitely living the part. Even in the autopsy photos, that shambler from the darkside was a sight to behold.

His name was Charlie Steiner and he was nearly twenty-three years old -- too big to be trick-or-treating. And Charlie was big... football-lineman big. If you know your old Universal Studios creepers, he was definitely more a product of the Lon Chaney, Jr. engine of destruction school of mummidom than the Boris Karloff wicked esthete branch. But either camp you put him in, he was a long way from the cut-rate dime-store variety when it came to living dead Egyptians.

Because this mummy wasn't playing a role.

He was embodying one.

Which is another way of saying: He was living a dream.

Charlie's bandages were ripped Egyptian cotton, dredged in Nile river-bottom he'd ordered from some Rosicrucian mail-order outfit. He was wound and bound and wrapped tight for the ages, and he wasn't wearing a Don Post mask he'd bought from the back pages of Famous Monsters of Filmland. No. Charlie had gone full-on Jack Pierce with the makeup. Furrows and wrinkles cut deep trenches across his face like windblown Saharan dunes, and the patch of mortician's wax that covered one eye was as smooth as a jackal's footprint... add it all up and drop it in your treat sack, and just the sight of Charlie would have made Boris Karloff shiver.

And you can round that off to the lowest common denominator and say that Charlie Steiner would have scared just about anyone. Sure, you'd know he was a guy in a costume if you got a look at him. But even on first glance, you might believe this kid was twenty-three going on four thousand.

Look a little closer, you'd see the important part: Charlie Steiner was twenty-three going on insane. There was no dodging that if you got close enough to spot the mad gleam in his eye -- the one he hadn't covered with mortician's wax. Or maybe if you spotted his right hand, the one dripping blood... the one he'd shorn of a couple fingers with a butcher's cleaver. And then there was his tongue, half of it cut out of his mouth with a switchblade, its purple root bubbling blood.

Charlie wrapped those things in a jackal's hide he'd bought from the back pages of a big-game hunting magazine with Ernest Hemingway on the cover. Who knew if that hide was real but Charlie believed in it, same way he believed in the little statue of the cat-headed goddess he added to the stash, along with a dozen withered red roses, his own fingers and tongue, and a Hallmark Valentine's Day card....