The United Monster Talent Agency

Great short from FX guru Greg Nicotero -- I always wondered how Universal kept those monsters in line. (And bonus points if you can spot David J. Schow in this one!)

Creatures!

Editors John Langan and Paul Tremblay have popped the cork on a forthcoming anthology, releasing the Table of Contents for Creatures! Thirty Years of Monster Stories. The nitty gritty runs like this: twenty-six tales, 150,000 words, coming at you in trade paperback from Prime Books ($14.95). I don't have a release date yet, but will let you know when I get word.

In the meantime, I'm looking forward to this one. Hey, it's got a Jeff Ford story I haven't read (an Island of Dr. Moreau piece, at that), plus a Creature from the Black lagoon tale. That's enough to get me to dig in, right there.

IT CAME AND WE KNEW IT
Godzilla's Twelve-Step Program Joe R. Lansdale
The Creature from the Black Lagoon Jim Shepard
After Moreau Jeffrey Ford
Among Their Bright Eyes Alaya Dawn Johnson
Under Cover of Night Christopher Golden
The Kraken Mike Kelly
Underneath Me, Steady Air Carrie Laben

IT CAME AND WE COULD NOT STOP IT
Rawhead Rex Clive Barker
Wishbones Cherie Priest
The Hollow Man Norman Partridge
Not from Around Here David J. Schow
The Ropy Thing Al Sarrantonio
The Third Bear Jeff Vandermeer

IT CAME FOR US
Monster Kelly Link
Keep Calm and Carillon Genevieve Valentine
The Deep End Robert R. McCammon
The Serpent and the Hatchet Gang F. Brett Cox
Blood Makes Noise Gemma Files
The Machine Is Perfect, the Engineer Is Nobody Brett Alexander Savory
Proboscis Laird Barron

IT CAME FROM US
Familiar China Mieville
Replacements Lisa Tuttle
Little Monsters Stephen Graham Jones
The Changeling Sarah Langan
The Monsters of Heaven Nathan Ballingrud
Absolute Zero Nadia Bulkin

At The Only Diner In Hell...

You'll find one of these in every booth.*

And a jukebox that always plays Jerry Wallace's "If You Leave Me Tonight, I Will Cry."**

And a Vietnam vet sitting at the counter whose dead buddies are just outside, closing in...***

* Mystic Seer from Richard Matheson's classic Twilight Zone episode, "Nick of Time."

**"The Tune in Dan's Cafe" from Night Gallery.

***Dead soldiers courtesy of Robert R. McCammon's masterful short story "Nightcrawlers," adapted for the eighties Twilight Zone reboot. (Bonus points: Exene Cervenka is your waitress!)

Sunday Supplement 1

Or, some stuff worth reading out there in the blogosphere:

Laird Barron writes of hell and dreams.

Rockin' Randy Fox riffs on Swiss hotel clerks and the great cosmic whack-a-mole game of seventies UFO sightings.

David J. Schow explores a mystery filed just this side of The Outer Limits.

Brian Keene kicks into gear on the whole Borders situation (and bookstore customers who don't buy books).

Enjoy!

Hold Your Horses

After I accidentally hung up on my five-year-old niece and apologized to her dad about it (see last Sunday's post), I traded some emails with my brother-in-law Blaise. In one of them Blaise sent me a link to a cowboy song of his own making (sung by the Mysterious and Talented Elaine). I love cowboy songs, especially spooky ones, so I was moved to write Blaise a fan letter, which I think is even better than the apology I wrote last week:

Dear Blaise:

"Hold Your Horses" is my new favorite song. I like the singing. I like the Western guitar. In fact, this song makes me want to polish my Colt revolver and ride into Tombstone wearing black. I would bring a sawed-off shotgun with me, of course, and a Bowie knife, too.

If you were there, playing "Hold Your Horses" in a saloon, I would listen to the song and applaud.

Then I would yank my Bowie knife and carve the scalp from your skull, so it would be just as clean and white as a fresh-laid egg.

Your fan,
Norm

We Are Controlling Transmission

My buddies John Scoleri and Peter Enfantino are the guys who brought you A Thriller A Day, the great blog celebrating Boris Karloff's Thriller series. Now they have a new blog that gives the same treatment to the classic Outer Limits TV show, and you can click on over and join the fun at We Are Controlling Transmission.

Anyway, John and Pete know everything (and what they don't know they can ask David Schow about), which is another way of saying that the blog is definitely a keeper. I'm backtracking through it, as the official debut slipped off my radar. And since I'll be contributing a piece about one of the second-season episodes, I'd better grab control of the horizontal and vertical and kick things into gear... because I've gotta date with a Megasoid!

Portents

When I started out as a writer, Charles Grant's Shadows anthologies were textbooks for me. Like Grant's own work, the stories in Shadows showed how to do quiet horror right, and it was in his anthologies that I encountered the work of some very fine writers for the first time -- Ramsey Campbell, Avram Davidson, T. E. D. Klein, Steve Rasnic Tem, and Al Sarrantonio to name a few.

Sarrantonio's short stories have long been favorites of mine (i. e. if you don't have a copy of his masterful collection Toybox in your library, you're missing some essential reading, pard). Al's also gone on since the Shadows days to become one of the premiere anthology editors in the business, and now he's introducing his own compilation of horror tales on the quiet side: Portents.

And what a lineup of writers he's got: Gene Wolfe, Joyce Carol Oates, Ramsey Campbell, Joe R. Lansdale, Brian Keene, Kit Reed, Melanie Tem, Steve Rasnic Tem, Kealan Patrick Burke, Neal Barret, Jr., Elizabeth Massie, Nina Kiriki Hoffman, Kim Newman, Michael Laimo, Jeffrey Ford, Tom Piccirilli, and Alan M. Clark. Plus, I'm proud to say that the lead story in Portents is a new piece by my talented bride, Tia V. Travis. "Still" is a Canadian ghost story with the hard bite of a prairie wind, and you won't want to miss it.

Portents won't be available in stores. You can't grab it on Amazon. Copies of the 1,000 copy limited edition are only available from Al himself. It's $30 (plus $5 shipping and handling), and you can pre-order it now from Al by contacting him at Flyingfoxpub @ aol dot com. From all reports it looks like the book should be shipping soon, so don't snooze if you want a copy. With the roster of talent above, my bet is they'll go fast.